(But, my understanding is that if we adopt the proper way of thinking and being, and pursue it honestly and with the proper intentions - it will sooner-or-later lead us to Christianity.)
What is needed is a metamorphosis of thinking - a qualitative change in the form of thinking.
(Because modern thinking is intrinsically incoherent, pathological and anti-Christian: we really must change it. Modern Man has tried and tried to believe in Christianity while thinking like a nihilist - it doesn't work. The thinking weakens, erodes, subverts the belief.)
But specifically why must we change thinking? Aside from its fundamentally anti-Christian structure and assumptions and implications; what are the reasons?
1. We have the urge and the need to change it
Positively, we want more and better than life can have with the way we currently think; negatively we are experiencing alienation and all the consequent nihilism (lack of meaning, purpose and relation).
I say 'we' have this urge and need... well I do - and that inner drive is sufficient for me; but not everybody does. Indeed, probably only few people have the urge and need, so...
2. Consequences
It is our divine destiny to move beyond our current way of thinking; this is the path of theosis by which we become more-god-like, more fully gods. We need to think the way God thinks - qualitatively.
And if we do not, then our fate will be one of corruption, decline away from the divine; and ultimately of deliberate, purposive, self-chosen degradation, god-rejection hence damnation.
(We may, or may not, experience greater suffering - but it is possible that our souls may become ruined, our spirits poisoned; even while our minds, bodies and feelings are pampered and indulged.)
3. Freedom
We want to be free - we want, that is, to be awake, conscious, self-aware and active in thought; and not to be unconscious, constrained and compelled, asleep, distracted, and passive in our thinking. The new mode of thinking is for those who really want real freedom - as a priority.
4. We want to grow-up
At present our culture is wilfully stuck in adolescence, clinging to perpetual youth; or else we turn back from this horror and attempt (only ever with partial success, because it is doomed to fail) to return to the mode of being of childhood. But we may wish instead to grow-up, to become more-and-more intensely and frequently as-God-is in thinking: the spiritually adult way of thinking and being.
5. Living in thinking
We may wish to live in our thinking; in our newly active state of knowing; and not, as is currently usual, to live in our feelings or in our minds. We may wish to know directly and inwardly, rather than at secondhand via communications and media. We may wish to live personally, familially, uniquely and specifically; rather than generally, generically, abstractly, institutionally. And by judgement; rather than by committees, votes, procedures, consensus, coercion, laws, rules, principles, protocols...
What - exactly - should we do?
Do one thing - and that thing is Primary Thinking; or by another name, Final Participation (Owen Barfield); or by another name Pure Thinking, or the Imaginative Soul (Rudolf Steiner).
But what does this entail? How would thinking actually change? In short it is thinking of the real/ deep/ divine self - and it is thinking that we recognise as valid and unbounded (it is heady stuff this thinking!).
Many, many things would result - here collected under eight headings...
1. Metaphysics - a new set of fundamental assumptions concerning the nature of reality. This is the basis for taking primary thinking seriously - as valid; and it is also the consequence of primary thinking, seriously pursued.(A virtuous cycle.)
2. Healing - therapy for the chronic sickness of our soul, the split between self and environment - between experience and theory; which has afflicted Man ever since the commencement of modernity with its self-consciousness.
(The problem always was there, but as a child and in earlier eras were were not aware of it; we simply took experience for granted.)
Thinking has (so far) been our plague; but primary thinking can become the cure of its own disease.
3. Meaning, purpose and relationship built-into our way of thinking (instead of being excluded by it).
4. A transformation, a beginning of evolution - the experience (and expectation of) a moving-towards the goal of metamorphosis, of a changed and better way of thinking and being.
5. Motivation. At present Western, modern Man is profoundly demotivated - he does not want to do anything very much, very far ahead or to make sacrifices for something better...
Primary thinking will be - by contrast - a joy, an enthusiasm, an excitement and an expectation; a recovery of deep and lasting motivation.
(So freedom and motivation both... that is good.)
6. Positivity, optimism. These are products of faith in the goodness of God as loving parent; and the trust that our actual lives are, therefore, adequate to fulfilling his deepest wishes for our eternal well-being. This we can know directly - unmediated - by primary thinking. With Christ's gift of repentance, we are then immune to everything life may throw at us; anything can be turned to good...
7. Agency and Freedom. Do we truly want to be free - free in our deepest thought? Live from our-selves, not coerced or passive but generative, creative? Pursuit of freedom, agency, creativity all become possible, indeed inevitable - in the deepest sense. In primary thinking, freedom is directly experienced - we can observe our freedom in-action.
8. Autonomy. Because our (true) self is divine, because God is within us, because we have direct knowledge of God; then we have a solid and certain basis for everything.
We are not dependent on the chances of institutions, society, books, preserved traditions or uncorrupted authorities... even when these are all lacking, we can survive and thrive - by trial/ error/ repentance we can develop, and move towards The Good.
We need not go it alone - we can and should accept genuine help when available and needed; but we are not dependent on the external.
4 comments:
Is there a difference between Primary thinking and Intuition or are they the same thing? I find that when I experience an intuition in my heart of the reality of a thing or of its innate value it somehow resonates with me in a way that lets me know I am being guided towards something eternally good. It is only when I try to rationalize or intellectually over think the experience that it loses its potency. As I grow older I learn to rely on this direct apprehension of things intuitively and accept it as real and valid without the impediment of my overlaid scientific or reductionist mind derailing what has really always felt natural and is in many ways similar to how I remember experiencing my place in the world as a small child. Such experiences are hard to articulate but I can percieve that there is a universal thought world that we must all share or else we truely can never really understand another human beings plight. The realisation of a shared source of inner guidance or intuition seems a potent antidote to the modern alienated condition you often describe.
The difference (by my definitions) is that intuition is an instantaneous event of grasping something simple and clear in a single act of comprehension; whereas Primary Thinking is a linear process of thinking (which may, or may not, lead up-to an intution - or from an intuition). Primary Thinking which could, in princple, go on forever (in the case of a fully divine being).
Valentin Tomberg uses primary thinking in an amazing way. His insight into the Gospels or into Tarot is absolutely stunning.
@GDV - I agree that Tomberg was a genuine mystic and one of the greatest exponents of 'primary thinking'.
I have a very different metaphysics from him (I cannot follow his Platonism and 'numerology') - but his underlying insights are clearly valid.
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