Can anything effective be done to reverse disenchantment?

We all probably experience personal disenchantment as a process through our childhood - a transformation of the world from being a magic place of hidden motives and meanings (often sinister and malign) - to the mundane materialism of adult and mainstream life. 

There is also a slower, social trend towards societal disenchantment - that I have both read-about and also experienced in my own life. in the 1970s and 80s, even such mundane materialistic bureaucratic "systems" as schools, universities, hospitals - and many cities - were still touched by a kind of residual-enchantment that was spontaneous, often unconscious. 

And there were then still many people who remembered them as even more magical - and treated them as such - and added to the enchantment thereby. 


As a romantic by nature; I felt these receding of enchantment in my life, and the world around me, very keenly at the time - and did my best to fight against it by holding-onto the residuum, and trying to build from it: but with little and lessening success.  


I did this because it seemed then, and it seems now, that a mundane world and life - without enchantment, depth, spiritual resonance, in a dead and unconscious universe - is simply not worth living. 

If life is nothing more than comfort, convenience, amusement, and excitement for the (temporarily) "fortunate" - and pain, disability, disease, degeneration, and death for the rest (and everybody, sooner or later) -- then such a life is a matter of indifference to the mass of mankind; as evidenced by the reluctance to have children, or indeed lift a finger, to defend it.  

And it seems that (on the whole) the rest-of-the-world agrees with me on the worthless futility of a mundane life; because most people are actively-planning or diligently-implementing the end of civilization (thus themselves and their loved-ones); or are going-along-with-it in a state of denial and idle-incomprehension - having no better ideas or ideals. 


But if clinging to the residuum of enchantment does not work; and since this disenchanted world cannot motivate us to sustain it; then it seems we must seek something else if we are not to fall inevitably into despair. 

It seems that a viable re-enchantment of the world, to be attempted in some new kind of spirit, from some new kind of understanding, is actually the most important thing in the world

I personally cannot let this subject alone; and when I am not brooding on it in a would-be constructive fashion, I feel as if I am neglecting my most fundamental duty. 


I have encountered quite a few good ideas about what we ought to be doing towards a genuine and effective re-enchantment - for examples I have often referenced the likes of Steiner, Barfield, Arkle - but none of their practical ideas to encourage or create re-enchantment seem to work nowadays; and some seem counter-productive (although they probably did work, to an extent, in their eras). 

My current conclusion is that the task has now devolved from the group to the individual; so that general plans and schemes, and recommendations of a generalized kind, have apparently ceased to be useful. 

Since the necessity remains; this may imply that re-enchantment has become the work of the present day, or even hour. 

We each must start afresh start from here-and-now and from our current personal state of being - whenever we become conscious of the need.  


Very vague, I realize; and maybe yet another ineffective suggestion? But maybe not. Maybe there is little alternative; and maybe that is the way God has made it. 

We can only do what we ought to do - if we are to do anything at all in the necessary direction.

And since God is the creator, and God loves each of us; we can assume that any small positive good we accomplish (in thought or action) and that is worth it; shall be noticed and amplified by God to ramify throughout his creation. 

 

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Published on August 02, 2024 00:29
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