Bruce G. Charlton's Blog, page 16

Another Juniper - Gryphon

Following on from my earlier Juniper meditations; here is Juniper Suite from the first album of the 1970s medieval-folk band Gryphon. 

It's an unusual (and quite brief) example of the kind of "concept" music that was popular at the time; (according to the sleeve notes) meant to be illustrative of a bit of countryside of which the group were fond. 

Another Juniper

Following on from my earlier Juniper meditations; here is Juniper Suite from the first album of the 1970s medieval-folk band Gryphon. 

It's an unusual (and quite brief) example of the kind of "concept" music that was popular at the time; (according to the sleeve notes) meant to be illustrative of a bit of countryside of which the group were fond. 

Crossing a threshold into a New Age of consciousness at the Millennium - its unexpected fulfilment

I continue to cycle back to consider that the New Age of human consciousness, so eagerly anticipated by "spiritual" people of the late 20th century to be coming-upon Mankind at about the millennium - and by which we would cross a kind of threshold into a qualitatively different relationship with reality... actually happened; yet not-at-all in the manner hoped-for. 
There has been a transformation of consciousness, but it hasn't been of the kind that was so optimistically envisaged. 

People are not more spiritual; alienation, egoism, and awareness of separateness are stronger than ever. There is not a spontaneous sense of oneness, nor of attunement with the universe. 
The change did not make us better people, nor has it made us happier, nor has it led to a kinder human society with diminished suffering. 
Neither do people in general have either a closer relationship with nature, or a closer sense of personal involvement with ultimate reality. 

So much for what didn't happen - but if I believe there was a millennial transformation, then what did happen; and why did it go so wrong? Or at least, so very differently from what was envisaged? 
What happened was pretty much as predicted by Rudolf Steiner and confirmed by Owen Barfield - in that the changes of the past several centuries reached a threshold after which we were each required consciously to choose the basic assumptions on the basis of which we would understand our lives. 
The residues of innate, unconscious, spontaneous spirituality; that had been dwindling for centuries, finally became so weak and feeble that they ceased to operate. The progressive "disenchantment" became so extreme that social life ceased to be humanized, personalized and sweetened by it. 

Everything became materialistic and mundane; explicit, procedural, bureaucratic. Experience divided into the subjective and the objective - and the objective was impersonal - a realm of entertainment and exploitation, and exploitative entertainment - it became "politicized" and systemic. 
And - because we are alienated, nowadays we all know this; and insofar as we regard the public/ institutional, social realm as objectively real - then this is the reality we have chosen. 
Meanwhile, everything else, is regarded as subjective hence arbitrary - and relevant only to our private emotions*.  

21st century Man has chosen his assumptions, then chosen to assert that these assumptions are inescapable reality; and painted himself into this corner of purposelessness, meaninglessness and hopelessness.  That is the nature of the millennial threshold and the New Age. 
Yet... if this can be understood, and if we choose to take ultimate and personal responsibility for what we regard as the nature of ultimate reality - instead of assuming that this is "a given" to which we can only submit passively...
Then we may consciously choose another path by which we each-and-all may individually participate in divine creation; and each bring to it something unique and irreplaceable. 
And that would be the threshold to a New Age, a new consciousness, which is worth living.  
**
* Note: I should also record that there is also an assertion of subjectivism - that because it is only in the subjective and personal that we can find purpose, meaning and enchantment, we ought therefore to regard the subjective as reality. Well, this is "easy to say" - but I have never come across anybody who remotely does it: either in their speech, or observable actions! Such a recommendation is (whatever its merits in an ideal sense) un-real and un-motivating, even to those who most vehemently espouse it. 
The self-chosen false dilemma of 21st century Man is therefore between an objective public discourse that is death and despair; and a subjective personal world that is experienced as unreal and unmotivating.
The (obvious?) conclusion is apparently a case of "back to the drawing board" to discover on what basis these (supposedly exclusive) alternatives were formulated. 
And, it turns-out, that means going back a very long way down - deeper than almost anybody else has been or is prepared to go...
Which is, in a nutshell, the reason for our current situation.   

We demand blueprints for living; yet we don't believe in blueprints

Yes but what shall we do about it? 

People are so eager to jump onto this question of what should we do, that we routinely demand action without understanding. 

For people of 2025; "doing" means: "Give me a blueprint!" 

Doing apparently begins with a blueprint, and happens via a blueprint. 

Advice and instruction is demanded in the form of such blueprint-variants as a plan, bullet points, a check-list, a flow-chart... 

A blueprint of instructions labelled with stuff like: How to save the Planet, How to save the West, How to be happy, How to stop racism/ sexism, How to get girls (or How to get married). 

And yet it is a stale truism that modern people no longer believe in blueprints. 

Unlike Men of a century and more ago - we of 2025 no longer accept the validity of categorical descriptions... 

The categories seem arbitrary - so many are the exceptions and overlaps. The stereotypes don't seem to fit ourselves or those we know. We don't believe in the possibility of any utopian state. The actuality of mundane life is impervious to our dreams and aspirations. 

So we demand blueprints - only blueprints are real and serious. But we compulsively ridicule, subvert and dissect any and all blueprints. 

Indeed, anyone who actually hands us the kind of blueprint that we crave; is assumed to be manipulating us for his own benefit - or else as an agent of The System. 

   

Such are the roots of our endemic demotivation. We assume that we ought to be motivated by some blueprint for  life; depicting life's purpose, meaning, and our future within it... We seek and seek for such a blueprint. Yet any actual blueprint is soon regarded as obviously invalid and inadequate. 

Such is a world rooted in negations, in negative values - a world where we know what we do not want, but haven't a clue what we do want - or else where our desires are in stark contradiction each wit hthe others, hence unattainable even in theory. 

We want a blueprint because it can - in principle - be shared - can be made policy, can be implemented...

And because anything less objective than a blueprint will (apparently) be just for our-selves. 

In sum: we know what we want, but we cannot have it. 

The answer must be to go back and go deep; and discover the nature of blueprints, the assumptions that lie behind them, our craving for them; to discover whether we really want what we so insistently demand - and so inevitably reject. 

Only then might we discover some alternative that might motivate us.  

"Buckle up!" - What a lame phrase...

A personal peeve is that phrase "buckle up!" - as prefacing something metaphorical like "We're in for a wild ride!"* 

This always strikes me as lame; in the same way as those signs in dull offices that say: "You don't have to be mad to work here - but it helps!"

The same kind of pseudo-jollity and false bonhomie; which, in practice, always seems to be affected by those most conspicuously lacking in either. 

*Or, in an earlier incarnation: "Fasten your seatbelts..!"

Resentment is almost unavoidable as a motivation - unless there is a stronger positive goal

I have often written about our age's besetting-sin or "master sin" of resentment; including how negative resentment is the basis of the mainstream dominating socio-political ideology of "leftism". 

(Where leftism is understood to include all types of secular materialism with some variant of an hedonic ethical basis - including conservatism, Republicans, libertarians, nationalists etc.) 

Thus the pseudo-goals of leftism (taken up and discarded expediently) such as equality, feminism, antiracism, anti-anti-semitism, climate environmentalism - are all negative, all oppositional in their nature, all against some-thing. 

...With the purported "utilitarian" justification that this negation will lead to greater human "happiness" of some group or all people - in which happiness is (in recent generations) equated, bottom line, with diminished-suffering. 

(And where suffering is itself conceptualized as a departure-from some implicit and imagined state of not-suffering.)  

The negations are indeed multiple, since to be against some presumed cause of suffering is already a triple-negation - or is it quadruple!... At any rate, in modern leftism there is no serious or would-be-coherent vision of an utopian, happy-state, of society. 

Thus we have the negative ideology of diminishing suffering; while lacking any reference state of a happy world and people. 

How did this happen? Because surely Man cannot and should-not live by negations alone? 

Not by accident; but not wholly imposed top-down either. 

Of course, nowadays the top-down structural political encouragements and inducements (the propaganda in education systems and the mass media, the subsidies and legal exemptions, the careerism) are all very evident. 

But there is another side to things - which is that, after the decline and end of spontaneous religiosity; there were no sufficiently-strong positive motivators.  

Nationalism is a good example; since in several societies it was the first attempted replacement for religion as a basis for social cohesion. Typically, nationalist movements start with considerable emphasis on positive national characteristics and "spirit", and national destiny... 

But always this proves to be too feeble to motivate, and the positive national destiny turns-out either to be a minority aspiration - and/or generally inadequate to provide a basis for national cohesion and direction. 

The nationalism invariably degenerates into double-negativity: into opposition to some source of presumed (or real) harm. For instance; the nationalism of resentment of some particular other-nation or group becomes the main theme, the main source of cohesion, the main basis of the main policies. 

This has been the fate of every nationalist movement of which I am aware: such Germany, Ireland, Scotland and... fill-in the gaps. 

A similar tale could be told of socialism degenerating into class war; feminism into sex war, pro-natural world environmentalism into a negative and destructive crusade against "carbon", antiracism into racism etc. 

The dominance of resentment is therefore a secondary consequence of the feebleness of positive motivators in a post-religious world. 

Resentment provides (at least in the short term) a basis for cohesion against a common "enemy"; and a basis for strategies to deal with this threat. 

But in the long-term, all these negations purposively destroy society - and this is inevitable unless resentment is superseded.  

  

What about individual persons? Why are we (nearly all of us) so helplessly vulnerable to pro-resentment propaganda that strives to turn us, each-and-all, into a self-perceived victim of somebody or something; a seething cauldron of entitlement, fears, anger, spitefulness? 

The ultimate cause is the same - which is the feebleness of our positive motivations. 

Of course it is facile to spout positive slogans, or pretend to be driven by positive goals about some future of enhanced achievement, creation, beauty, love... 

But actual behaviour (e.g. what people think, speak and write about; media and bureaucratic productions; laws, policies and behaviours) suggests that these are gross exaggerations that serve merely as dishonest excuses to hide the endemic negativity of core motivators. And we get the observable socio-cultural-psychological dominance of resentment as a core motivator. 

The only good answer; the only spiritual solution to the sin, is to recognize and repent it. 

This is an essential first step. 

Yet, if we desire to defeat a particular resentment in ourselves that is dominating and distorting our lives - and if we do not want simply to replace one sin by another: such as resentment replaced by self-aggrandisement (a common sight on the internet)...

Then we need to discover a genuinely positive and strong positive motivator that can press-down-upon and net-over-ride resentment; and this motivator must be religious. 

Because only religion is a stronger long-term motivator with sufficient potential for coherence and direction. 

And so we circle back to the problem of discovering a positive and personally-motivating and good religion in the 21st century - which is our only hope for genuine betterment. 

Juniper, Hexhamshire

This appeared in the Hexham Courant newspaper 1-4-2010: 

A Hexhamshire hamlet is changing its name in order to cash in on the millions of a sixties superstar. The tiny community of Juniper will in future be known as Jennifer Juniper, following a request from hippy Hero Donovan. Cash-strapped Northumberland County Council is understood to have agreed to the name change in return for a £5 million donation to council coffers. The denim-decked singer made a fortune in the 1960s from songs like Catch the wind, Universal Soldier, Mellow Yellow and Sunshine Superman, but his personal favourite was always Jennifer Juniper. He took a tour of Tynedale whilst staying at Slaley Hall and fell in love with the quaint hamlet of Juniper. He spotted a dappled mare grazing in a field and just wanted to be part of the place. Villagers have reported being offered large wads of cash for their properties but no-one was prepared to move out of the close-knit community. A consultation exercise on the name change is being carried out by the county council, but comments had to be in by noon yesterday.

(NB: Check the date.)

Juniper is a charming village in the scenic Hexhamshire region of Northumberland, south of Hexham; this was for centuries under the administration of the Archbishop of York, rather than the Bishop of Durham whose territory surrounded it by a wide margin.

(There were also, until the early 1800s, three "islands" of Durham County within the borders of Northumberland.) 

This absent landlordism meant that Hexhamshire was outwith the rule of law, and the area became notorious as a den of bandits and other ruffians - a place they could retreat with impunity, after wrongdoing elsewhere.  

Something of this danger still seems to cling to the region, if my experience is any guide; because over the decades we have been surrounded by a pack of farm dogs (until called-off at the last minute), actively attacked by an insane stallion (rearing and trying to smash down with his hooves - I somehow cleared a four foot barbed wire fence to escape); most recently menaced from behind a flimsy fence by an angry (?) mastiff and his mates when walking along a busy public footpath. 

This looks like the place of the dog pack... We stood on a stile, surrounded; fighting them off with sticks

Interesting location, altogether.

There is also an unusual and appealing (syncopated) folk song called the Hexhamshire Lass - here done by Fairport Convention.   

Social transformation or Personal transformation? Two historical ways of misunderstanding Jesus's work and aim

If it can be assumed that the Fourth Gospel is correct, and that Jesus Christ's aim and (successful) work was to offer those who followed him eternal resurrected life, in a second creation (i.e. another and new world) that is Heaven...

Then I think we can perceive two major directions of historical misunderstanding (or, perhaps, mis-appropriation) whereby Jesus was instead assumed to be instituting a new religion of this-world: one was making this-world a better place; the other was making ourselves better people...

Such that Jesus was mistakenly believed either to be offering:

1. Social transformation; or

2. Personal transformation.

Social transformation was assumed to be accomplished by social methods - aimed at the adoptive-"tribe" of Christians. 

This would be accomplished by building a new social religion, that is a new priesthood and church-organization; so that the life of all Men in that society would be changed. 

This actually happened; especially with the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity. Through history there have been several societies that have been transformed, by several kinds of Christian church. 

The idea is that Men would be improved as individuals secondarily, by the primary means of making their social world a better place. 

Personal transformation was assumed to be accomplished by the already-ancient and still present methods of mystery religion (eg. in Mithraism): by selection, initiations, training of the mind in accordance with the will.

This also actually happened. The methods of personal transformation were variously adopted for the priesthood (and later for the religious orders) of the social religion. The goal of personal transformation also led to what-gets-called the "Gnostic" strand of Christianity.

The idea was that individual Men would be made better primarily (albeit in an esoteric setting); and such Men would secondarily, as a consequence, "leaven the lump" and make this world a better place. 

       

But if Christianity is not really about making this world a better place - and if Jesus is understood as having said that - ultimately, spiritually - this world cannot by its nature be made a significantly better place... 

Then this means that social and personal transformation - while both possible - will not have the effect of betterment. 

If, in fact, Jesus taught that personal transformation does not make better men, and social transformation does not make better societies - then the major emphases of the actual Christian religion through history have been wrong. 

(Whether or not Jesus is understood to have asserted or implied that social and personal transformation cannot - by the nature of this mortal and earthly reality - make the needful difference to the human condition; it can nonetheless be argued that his core and essential teaching was about the next-world, not his-world; and the post-mortal state, not about making people or societies better.) 

It is perfectly understandable that everyone will want a positive transformation of this mortal life: both personally and socially (even if they have different ideas about which ought to, or must, come first). 

In is perfectly understandable that people should hope and want that their religion will make them better people during their lives on earth, and make this this world a better place ASAP.

All this is understandable and indeed apparently inevitable...

For example: In our post-religious society; the atheist-materialist ideologies are focused on optimistic schemes aimed at positively-transforming our-mortal-selves and this-world. Indeed; everything else is excluded by assumption. 

But if, in fact, Jesus's essential and core work was aimed-at transforming our post-death and next-world state - and thus not at transforming this mortal life; then Christianity ought to have been - and ought now to be - a very different kind of religion than it actually has been and is. 

Appeals to moderation are always futile

When someone is "extreme", in whatever direction; then appeals to be moderate, to take a "middle path", are futile. 

Think about it: there are an infinite number of possible points between extremes. On what principle should we choose that point at which we are moderate? Presumably it isn't always necessarily half-way between extremes - but even if it was, what does that actually mean? 

Some kind of dilution of each extreme, somehow combined? Or some kind of 50:50 alternation between the extremes? Or what?  

In practice, the appeal for moderation is a negative recognition that neither option on-offer (by "extremists" is desirable - but no alternative principle is being suggested. 

The appeal to moderation is therefore an acceptance of the theoretical framework of the extremes; which is why it is always futile. 

And why - insofar as anyone really is motivated by moderation: their motivation is always weak. (There is no such thing as "a courageous moderate".)

So long as the theoretical framework is intact, then the extremes will carry the greatest authority - and no matter how well-motivated, moderation will be understood as an unprincipled and incoherent, hence  feeble and pragmatic, compromise. 

The real answer is never moderation or a middle way - but some higher principle; some framework that stands above, transcends, and contains the world-views of the extremes. 

Occult and Esoteric - what do they mean? How to approach them?

Occult means hidden, and often refers to hidden knowledge. Typically, this is knowledge that has been kept secret (e.g. by being sustained in a closed society) - or perhaps knowledge encoded, so that only those who know the code can discover it. 

But hidden knowledge may instead be clear and simple, not secret but instead "hidden in plain sight" - not encoded but simply ignored by the majority. 

Ignored perhaps because it is no interest, in some way unwelcome (opening a "can of worms" they'd rather not deal with); or indeed so clear and so simple, that most people regard it as necessarily wrong, because the knowledge strikes them as embarrassingly childish and simplistic. 

Esoteric means "for the few" - and mostly refers to groups to human societies. The term often refers to exclusive groups characterized by rigorous selection and prolonged training; and typically includes groups that claim to posses secret occult knowledge or the keys to understand encoded occult knowledge. 

But, analogously with the possible meanings of occult; esoteric groups "for the few" as such are not confined to the holders of occult knowledge; but characterize almost many types of functional human institution - such as some universities or colleges, and legal and medical professions - and these also implicitly claim to possess occult knowledge which is not understandable except by those who are trained, and have the "keys".

More significantly; there is the question of why some groups are "for the few" - which might be because only few regard the matter as real and important, or who have an active interest. An esoteric grouping may happen (or be attempted) because "the many" are indifferent or hostile to the subject. 

When the majority believe that which is false, and are evil-affiliated; then the possibility of allying with good is necessarily restricted to "the few" - or even to a single person.   

When it comes to evaluating occult knowledge or esoteric groups, it seems evident that the terms are descriptive rather than intrinsically evaluative. 

As usual; the valuation depends primarily on matters such as purposes and motivations, and whether these are on the side of God and creation - or against them. 

Whether the real and underlying motivation is for this-worldly power, wealth, sex, success and the like - or to manipulate others and nature? Or instead to seek potentially good-aligned goals such as self-knowledge, experiential understanding of reality, encouragement in pursuit of salvation etc.  

It seems to me that (as of 2025, in The West) most of the people who are explicitly involved in esoteric groups and engaged with occult knowledge are badly-motivated: they are on the wrong side of the spiritual war of this-world. 

But the same applies to most Christians; and to most Christians in any particular church or denominations: they are badly-motivated. That is most self-identified Christians are (overall) on the side that opposes God in the spiritual war. 

In this mixed world, by its very nature; all Men are sinners, all groups are corrupted and all knowledge is impure. 

It is not our task to attempt the impossible of redeeming, or even reforming, The World; but to navigate our way though our life by discernment and in accordance with our intuition and divine guidance; as we desire and commit to following Jesus Christ.

This may (and it seems likely, given the nature of the world, en masse, here and now) lead us at some point to some degree of engagement with explicit or implicitly occult knowledge and the esoteric: 

So be it.  

**

Note: The above was stimulated by re-reading Gareth Knight's biography of his great friend the Reverend Canon Fr. Anthony Duncan: Christ and Qabalah: or, The Mind in the Heart (2013).