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That is the same dynamic, music and art can not be flattened into statistics, the subjective experience is the very root of their being and they have to be evaluated through internal reflection. That does not mean there is something unreal about it, quite the opposite. The so called objectivity can only be discussed within our subjective consciousness. (I'm not saying there is no such thing as objectivity, but that's another discussion) What got me particularly about the Spiritual List was that it was supposed to be celebrating spirituality and yet the very criteria was a materialistic fallacy, that's a sad state of affairs and illustrates how pervasive materialism is.

Thank you, I really appreciate your response. A lot of our thoughts get in the way of our experience of reality, I try to use my thoughts to help us see that that is so and trust that we see as much through our hearts as our eyes. I'm sorry I haven't created any new content for a couple of years, I am writing a biography of my father that is taking up a lot of spare time, but I have had ideas for other videos and it would be good to do some more. Your "my personal favorite content" comment surprised me, but then I thought its a big world out there and there is likely to be someone who particularly likes what I do, if I follow my own lights.

@@keriford54 Thanks for the reply. I am glad to hear you are not done. Likewise, I am surprised there isn't more interest in these topics, but that is probably another indication of our spiritual poverty. I look forward to your next postings.

Bravo!!

Thanks for watching.

Thanks, glad you're good with me posting my edit of your reading the first chapter

Many thanks for that, I have started work on writing a biography and have not made a video in quite a while, but hopefully I will create some more soon.

@@keriford54 Excellent I'm looking forward to it. May I ask whom the biography is about?

Sure, my father John Bevan Ford, an artist: www.aucklandartgallery.com/explore-art-and-ideas/artist/1992/john-bevan-ford?q=%2Fexplore-art-and-ideas%2Fartist%2F1992%2Fjohn-bevan-ford#:~:text=John%20Bevan%20Ford%20was%20internationally,and%20kahu%20(cloak%20forms).

@@keriford54 Oh amazing, I'll get a cope when it's done

Thanks, It'll likely be a few years

Yes I also thought that one must rephrase in one’s own words in order to interpret it better and smoothly

Thanks for your comments. I haven't read Malcolm yet, but recently bought a copy, so it's on my list. I think the integration of MacDonald's thought is one of the things that makes him so great and I think his work should be more widely appreciated.

Thanks for watching, I suspect I'm never going to speak loudly as it just wouldn't be me and my Kiwi accent might be a bit hard for some people, having said that I think my videos are better if I script them, this one was not scripted and I think it shows.

@@keriford54 th-cam.com/video/C4OiRuLt0Xs/w-d-xo.html

@@keriford54 I think you speak just dandy. Then again, I'm a Kiwi too so I don't hear a problem.

Thanks Claire, There is so much Steiner material that it can be daunting to make your way through it. I think there is still plenty of room for people to present Steiner's work as simply as possible, at some stage I'd like to do videos outlining the ideas of some of his key books.

That's more or less why I made this video. It matters how you approach Steiner, don't do it through his lectures, Philosophy of Freedom, the early works on Goethe, his Autobiography, Gary Lachman's biography and Robert McDermott's The Essential Steiner are the way to go and they both require and repay careful reading.

Actually, I have intended from time to time to do vlogs with as simple an explanation as possible of a particular book. I think this would be particularly valuable for Philosophy of Freedom & maybe Esoteric Science an outline. It'd take a fair bit of time and work to do, which I don't have at present, but it'd be worth doing.

@@keriford54 To me Steiner is so akin to Sweedenborg. They are both on lost in their own personal spiritual realities I can only try to find an axis point to hold on to. Those who can relate thank you.

I have read some Swedenborg and found him interesting, but I think Steiner is more important. Steiner to me is much more a philosopher and has a theory of knowledge that i think the contemporary world could benefit from. Owen Barfield I think puts a lot of the same insights as Steiner into a more acceptable format. Reading Barfield is a very good aid to understanding Steiner as he only writes about what he can independently verify.. I think the issue you are raising is a genuine problem and that is Steiner has a huge body of work derived from his lectures that is pretty arcane, and I am not certain of the value of it, but I think for those new to Steiner they are better off ignoring it. It can be distracting from important insights that he has to give. However, once his foundational book( the 2 Goethe books & Philosophy of Freedom) have been digested, I think his overall cosmology (as given in his book Occult Science an outline) is worth considering and speculating on how it fits into his foundational books.

Steiner waffles too much. Also vague, avoids specifics. I think it's deliberate. He had his own personal "agenda"

Although Steiner was with the Theosophists for a while he was not much influenced by them. I also don't see much influence from Indian philosophy or tradition, I wish he was more so, I find him unconvincing when he does comment on Indian spiritual tradition.. Have you read his autobiography? Steiner, in contrast to the Theosophists, was very western based.

@@keriford54 Steiner was thoughtful gentle and had more knowledge than 99% of society.

He deserves a lot more appreciation than he gets, but more importantly, I think it'd be a better world if more people made a genuine effort to understand his work.

@@keriford54 yes I agree anthroposophy is very complex but it's great for the soul. You can find his lectures on TH-cam. I listen to them all the time. Of course it's someone else reading it. But it's Steiner's actual word's. Have you studied theosophy or rosicrucian teachings. Yea I agree most don't want to put in the effort it takes to study. Occultism isn't something one just reads a book and your done. It's very complex and for me it's a life commitment.

@Kevin Wilmore definitely agree with but that's the beauty in enlightenment it comes in Waves.😁

Steiner himself stressed that you didn't need super-sensible knowledge to approach his work, it might help, especially if you are approaching his work through his lectures to the Anthroposophical society. But I'd like to see greater engagement with Steiner by the culture at large and I think the best way towards that is first come to an understanding of what he is saying in Philosophy of Freedom and his works on Goethe. The early work is not framed in an Anthroposophical context but it is in harmony with it.

@@keriford54 yea I agree I own the philosophy of freedom. And I listen to his lectures that are re read again by someone else. my main problem with let's say occult thought is. Be it anthroposophy or theosophy or Rosicrucian teachings. That sometimes if something written very complex. I have hard time mentally to keep up. I remember trying to read the the Rosicrucian cosmic consecration. I can read it but not I'm larger amount. That might just be my learning disorder I learn different from others. But my Passion for spiritual advancement I'd in fact there. Just blooming on its own time I guess. Thanks for responding and keeping his work alive.

Thanks Bruce, "meditative essay" is a good description, if not a happy meditation.

Thanks for the encouragement, it was good to do, it grew out of a few things I'd happened upon recently, one that I forgot to include was an article speculating how they were starting to think that consciousness might be a field phenomena like gravity, I think people thought this a liberating idea. Regarding the metaphors, if you aren't a materialist absolutely don't use them, there is no need, people will understand you still if you talk about your mind rather than your brain.

@@keriford54 Yes, I think materialists have realised they are in a corner philosophically, so the idea that consciousness is analogues to gravity is for them a way of keeping their world view going in the face of all the intellectual criticisms against them . I learned that the point of attack cannot hence be consciousness, it has to be the inherent meaning and logic of thinking, as it is directly experienced. For that cuts to the very chore of it; as you say, thought is not the processing of mindless information. It actually _means_ something, and we, the thinker, are actually active in it.

Given the context I don't expect anyone would have seriously thought that.

The Beatles definitely have a rise and fall arc, I'd say the trend was upwards to Sgt Pepper, I don't know if their manager's death in 1967 precipitated their decline or only marked it. But Magical Mystery Tour did not have have the creative vitality, Paul's "Hello Goodbye" is a song literally about nothing, I am the Walrus is I think John's last great song, but the EP is uneven. The trip to India I think was a good thing as John by then was seriously overdoing LSD and it cleaned him up and he had his last really productive writing streak with the Beatles there. However, those songs are not great, but better than what he did later. Getting together with a chaotic avant garde artist was a major mis step and John's solo work I find deeply frustrating. Paul had his musicality which saves his work but it is light on meaning. George was the only one that came back from the raids upon the inner life with anything of real substance, but by that time their collective judgement had fallen and the group didn't recognise that he was writing the best material and they should have been recording more of his songs that the sub standard ones of John and Paul. As for the visuals they are probably mostly inspired by the fact that I generally need to do a lot of editing to get rid of pauses and ahs, sound wise edits are mostly invisible but on the image they are very obvious, so i'm always trying to look for ways around that, but yes, this was meant to be a bit psychedelic, it wouldn't have seemed right for the George MacDonald video. Did you find it distracting?

@@keriford54 "Did you find it distracting?" Perhaps 'painful' is the word - my eyes/ vision is quite easly 'hurt. Consequently I listened rather than watched.

@@keriford54 Fascinating Keri, I was left wishing you had made the video longer! I was delighted to read more of your insights in these comments, in particular your observation that after India George Harrison's creativity was superior and offered a better direction for the group, but was ignored.

I just did this video as though I was explaining what i thought of George MacDonald to a friend. I had tried writing script, but in the end this unscripted talk worked for me. I never had any problem liking MacDonald's work, so I wonder if maybe you just find something inimical about his work. But if you do want to persevere Lilith would be a good work to focus on as I think it his most concentrated work. Thanks for the clarification about Tolkien's Golden Key introduction I couldn't remember if he'd done it or not.

Thanks for the critique Bruce. This video, was something of an experiment as Amo and I have had a number of conversations, I recorded it and edited it but primarily it was for our own benefit. I thought it'd be an interesting idea to share it, as I like the idea of a ideas expressed through conversation, but it seems likely that others may not gain much from it. I'll share your idea regarding the cartoons with Amo.

Thanks, Much appreciated, I did on the whole enjoy it. I actually read the whole book, if you're interested in more it can be found here: librivox.org/visions-and-revisions-by-john-cowper-powys/

We await some Powys on audible

Thanks for your kind reply, I didn't get a notification for this comment which is why I've been so slow to respond. I made the Barfield videos because I wanted to present his ideas as simply as I could, both to help me digest his ideas but also hopefully to help them have an impact on others, to give the opportunity for a little dialogue so that his ideas could start to live within the culture. I thought them well worth a lot more consideration than they get. I have seen a little Barfield activity but not a lot of engagement, people in the main don't seem to see what he is saying. I really couldn't see interest sparking off. I don't think I'll be doing any vlogs directly on Barfield for a while even though he is remaining an inspiration and a guide for me.

I read PK Dick in the mid to late 80s, I think he was somewhat influenced by A E van Vogt, he's definitely one of the most interesting science fiction authors, I liked how inventive he was, but both he and his characters tend to be pretty messed up which makes it hard for me to read him now, but I think I would like to chose one of his novels to re read.

@@keriford54 Yes, you are correct that Van Vogt was the main influence on PKD, and PKD defended him when his reputation was under attack. I've decided to give AEVV a shot, starting with Slan.

Well, I read Slan and liked it - I thought it started well and pulled me through; after a while the plot rather fell apart (for me, with big time jumps) but it came together satisfyingly at the end. I'll try something else by VV soon. Thanks for the recommendation.

@@BruceGCharlton That was quick. I'm glad you found it enjoyable, Van Vogt has been criticised for his writing method "using scenes of 800 words or so where a new complication was added or something resolved" you can see that in Slan, some thought it too artificial, but verse forms are artificial too. For me he distills some element of science fiction, I see a connection between him and PK Dick they';re both kind of ideas writers although van Vogt is more optimistic. The World of Null A was one of his other better known works, I should give it a re read.

@@BruceGCharlton I have a weird fascination with van Vogt (recently having flared up), this in spite of his longer works often failing to hold together fully. But there's something about the way the best of them pull me through. Try The Voyage of the Space Beagle (a "fix-up" novel--as he called them--made up of four shorter works), his two Null-A novels (skip the third written decades later), and his two Weapon Shop books. (And if you like the madness of the Null-A stories, contemporary SF novelist John C. Wright wrote a surprisingly van-Vogtian followup called Null-A Continuum.)

Thanks for your comment. I feel some tension between re reading and reading widely of an authors works, I'm coming to really appreciate getting to know individual works. I'm pretty late to Williams works and it is his novels that have the strongest impact for me, I'm not sure if their impact will deepen with re reading. I did read a little Machen some decades ago and there wasn't much available for me then, i was impressed at the time, but sadly I can't remember them well, maybe I should chase some down and give them another go. What works of his do you like most?

@@keriford54 Any of Machen's short stories I would recommend especially those collected in his Tales of Horror and the Supernatural. If novels are more your thing I would recommend The Hill of Dreams or a Fragment of Life. Some people are turned off by his horror, but with careful and broad reading a profound vision emerges; something more than just first rate horror. Machen was a devout Christian (this becomes clear from his friend's biography of him) and could also be called a Romantic; I find him one of the most interesting individuals I have come across.

I really enjoyed interview Bruce and find his take on the Inklings to be really illuminating. Imaginatively and spiritually rich.

Well thanks for making the effort of commenting again. I didn't remove your comment. Steiner is viewed as rather arcane and I'm trying to show that what he is talking about is of vital concern to us all.

@@keriford54 This video from Joel Wendt - Real Anthroposophy #5 important books to read - confirms your insight that Steiner's early books were of the greatest importance to Barfield: th-cam.com/video/_vFSDqwLiok/w-d-xo.html Joel quotes Barfield as describing Steiner's Opus 2 Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception as the "Least read, most important work that Steiner ever wrote". I would recommend viewing the whole of the Real Anthropology sequence of talks, in fact - I learnt a good bit from it, watched it about three times.

Thanks Bruce. I enjoyed that, I'll have to watch the series. The early Steiner book definitely are much closer in tone and way of thinking to Barfield. The two Goethe books and Philosophy of Freedom should be read repeatedly. I haven't really spent any time with Anthroposophists but Joel Wendt seems to suggest that they don't pay sufficient attention to the early works. However, I was surprised that Steiner's anthroposophy books, where they relate to the Historical period, align so closely with Barfield and he was strongly influenced by them.

@@keriford54 yes, that is what I feel too. However, one big and interesting fact, which I haven't understood so far; is that Barfield rejected the Percept = Concept = Thinking scheme from PoF. This is also absent from the Goethe Worldview book; and I think OB may have taken his metaphysical understanding from the Goethe book rather than from the PoF. (I must admit that I have never been able to get fully to grips with the Goethe Weltanschuung book in the same way as I have achieved with the PoF, and Truth and Knowledge.) If Ama is reading this conversation, this matter is something he might be well equipped to evaluate and elucidate?

@@BruceGCharlton Hi Bruce, Keri just made me aware of this little discussion. Perhaps we could have a three-way chat one day? This point you raise is very interesting to me too, as I do sense some tension between Barfield and Steiner, although I had never considered that Barfield actively rejected Steiner's formulations. My assumption was that he is coming at everything from a different angle. Barfield starts from perceptable things like language and rainbows, whereas Steiner is coming at it from conceptual things such as knowledge and freedom. In my experience they compliment each other, keeping in check the tendency for misinterpretations. I am also reminded of something else. Steiner describes how the percept, in its act of appearing to us, conceals its true nature from us, and that thinking leads us back to this nature. Barfield says something in Saving the Appearances which I have always assumed is referring to this. He says that the appearances reveal by concealing. And then Barfield adds; "something that wiser minds than myself have managed to understand". I don't have the exact quote, as I have no idea where in the book he says this, but it stuck with me.

Found your comment Bruce, ir had been automatically tagged as possibly dodgy, weird.

While I understand the overall point you’re making, I recently read a blog on Barfield’s site (I think it’s an ‘official’ site) where he argued that Steiner introduced ideas that may take the rest of our age to fully blossom. Even goes as far as comparing him to Aristotle(who, of course, was fallible, as well). He also gives a wide ranging list of subtle ways Steiner had already affected society - even if ppl didn’t know it. An example I’ve noticed personally has been the number of ppl doing raised garden beds/hugelkulter. While ‘agricultural gurus’ will pay lip service to Steiner, the ppl who apply the knowledge have no idea who he is. And so, anthroposophy will continue to work in a subtle & hard-to-notice way.

Thanks for dropping by and commenting, sorry my critique wasn't a happier experience. But perhaps as Blake says "opposition is true friendship" and as we know the intense exchange that passed between Barfield and Lewis was known as the Great War. You have undoubtedly used Barfield ideas in this book, especially when you are describing key moments in change of consciousness. But I think you should take ownership of the way you used them and make clear how you diverge from Barfield. I have listed some key moments in my critique where it seems if you had had Barfield on your shoulder he would have objected and these are by no means all. Basically I'd say your book can serve as an introduction to Barfield but not as a guide. From what I have been hearing you did envisage this as presenting some key ideas of Barfield's to give them wider currency, it is not a study, so I don't know that we are far from agreeing on that. As for Steiner, I didn't expect a survey of his ideas but he should have been mentioned,, in your introduction p7 you are talking about "participation" & "shifts of consciousness" and say "He (Barfield) wasn't the first to notice it. Thinkers as diverse as the British utilitarian, Jeremy Bentham, and the American transcendentalist, Ralph Waldo Emerson, had done so before." This was the obvious place to mention Steiner as not only did Steiner have a theory of the Evolution of Consciousness, which Barfield thought aligned with his own, he like Barfield built an epistemology emerging from Romanticism "A Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception". Steiner also sees the advent of Christ as the pivotal moment in history and it seems likely that it was through Steiner that Barfield accepted this. Barfield did come up with the idea of evolution of Consciousness before discovering Steiner, but not long before and he developed it after he had. Barfield says this in the opening sentences of the 1966 Introduction to "Romanticism Comes of Age": "The HANDFUL of books I have written and published during my life have been spread over a very long period of time, more than forty years in fact. With two exceptions, which are not material and are both out of print, in each one of these books I have made clear in oneway or another the paramount debt I owe to Rudolf Steiner." Surely a "paramount debt" should be enough for him to rate a mention.

@@keriford54 We'll agree to disagree. You hoped for a different book. I could have mentioned Steiner, yes, and I am sorry if the absence causes offence. It is not intended but for the reasons above. (My point of mentioning Bentham and Emerson was to indicate the striking diversity of people who have also been interested in the history of words, Barfield's key expertise, not to discuss who Barfield was indebted to. He was indebted to neither of them and my book is not that kind of study.) In fact, Barfield has, in a sense, been sitting on my shoulder in the form of people who knew him and know his work, and who critiqued early drafts of the book. You can find them in the acknowledgements and endorsements. My experience of watching your review is not happy because of the strength of your language which I find unjustified, hence citing Saving the Appearances above. I don't think I do diverge from Barfield in spirit or insight, and certainly not so as to taunt, contradict and obscure. I hope to capture and amplify a fundamental aspect of his genius, his understanding of Christianity, and write for people who want to understand Christianity afresh, as the title says and as I explain in the introduction. I believe this is a crucial issue for us today spiritually.

I appreciated this exchange and feel Vernon has defended himself well. I think the reviewer was certainly hoping for something else, but I think Mark did what he describes he set out to do.

Hi Bruce, great to hear your "Barfield Book" is looking more likely. On the topic of positivism, I particularly enjoyed your recent blog about RUP in another guise - Residual Abstraction.

Well I am glad you enjoyed it, that's something. This was a hard one to do and I am glad I have done it, I wanted to poke a marker in the Renaissance, it probably needs some more support. I might have had too many things happening at once in this piece. I discovered Frances Yates 30 odd years ago and her work sparked something and I quoted her and named her in the title, but in a way this was a little misleading as I am not simply trying to expound her ideas more acknowledge her impetus. Yates was basically a historian who showed that the writers in the Hermetic Cabalistic Magic Platonic tradition in the Renaissance (even a label for it is hard) were much more central to the main cultural streams of the Renaissance than 20th C Historians admitted at the time. Yates is good at giving them cultural context and showing how they fit in historically. I used Steiner's quotes from Riddles of Philosophy to help place where these works fit in in regard to the history of consciousness, I thought that work of Steiner's had the strongest alignment to the content I was dealing with. I quoted sections of Fludd and Dee largely because I realised not many people will have read them. Maybe I could post a longer reading as a stand alone piece. But in both pieces we also see a quality of mind where mathematics, Theology, understanding of the divine and creation are all part of one unified paradigm, this is such a contrast with the disparate state of knowledge at present. Then with the Yates material on the foundation of the royal society, I wanted to show that tendency to measurement and the study of the external world, the world of perception, exclusive of study of the Divine came about not because those early practitioners rejected the study of the divine as irrelevant but to avoid charges of witch craft, strangely, to moderns, mathematics was regarded as akin to magic. If you look at Fludd's diagram the sub lunar world is the farthest from God, with Vedanta it is regarded as having a viel of Maya or illusion, But with materialist science they got used to studying it exclusively increasingly with the thought that it was independent of our selves, our consciousness and that the study of it was the only way to truth. To the ancients Truth is only fully with God and the truths of the sub lunar world are only partial. Does that make it any clearer? Do I need to create a new video explaining my last one?

@@keriford54 Yes, that's helpful. CS Lewis wrote about this matter in his chapter New Learning and New Ignorance at the start of his Oxford History of English Literature in the sixteenth century (1954) - but from a pro-medieval angle. He noted the way that magic and science arose together, as two sides of the same coin (and that, for example, witch trials were a feature of this early modern period, and were not 'medieval' as they are generally depicted in popular culture). Isaac Newton is a very vivid example of the science-magic nexus, now that his massive writings on alchemy and the like have been decoded and publicised. My feeling is that the synthesis you describe - while important - was a transitional phase, and could not have been sustained. Indeed, the Big Problem is that modernity - once begun - could not be stopped at any point where it was optimal (probably because of positive-feedback-type mechanisms at work); it is a long and slippery slope to totalitarian bureaucracy! Unless or until we get some kind of Romantic Religion...

Thanks Bruce for asking for clarification, I don't intend to be obscure and if its not clear to you who have a rich engagement with Barfield and Lewis then I have more work to do. I have got a copy of that CS Lewis book and read it not too long ago, but it is so comprehensive that it is a slog to read, but re-reading the introductory chapter sounds like a good idea. I am very impressed with Lewis Allegory of Love and the Discarded Image both of which succeed in entering imaginatively into the consciousness of the past, although I don't know Lewis would it express it that way and I get the feeling he was influenced by Barfield in those. There does seem to be a sense of inevitability about the rise of modernity but I think that the kind of internal historicism of Barfield is shining a light on what was happening in the human soul, I hope that we are finding a new way of thinking and Romanticism is coming of age.

@@keriford54 I can follow the vlog quite easily now - maybe I was me that was mentally below par on my first attempt! Or else your written description unlocked it... I can see the advantages of the early scientists who retained the moral basis from Christianity (and, later, from Judaism as well) - indeed this was a core theme of my Not Even Trying book. My belief was that the seeds of self-destruction were built-into science, and visible even in the 17th century. Nowadays, I see this in terms of the evolution of consciousness ideas of Barfield. But why do *you* think that this broke down, and do you regard real ('holistic' and integrated) science as possible nowadays - and under what circumstances?

Bruce, those are hard questions, I'll need to think about that.

A sad day, but luckily there are still plenty of other videos on both mine and Andrew's channel that still qualify