Owen Barfield: Imagination and Spiritual Sight, Pt 3

where we've come from we started off thinking about william blake and samuel taylor coleridge um mostly focusing on blake and blake gave us if you remember a kind of inner route map for our different imaginative states of mind if you remember his names of all roe which is a very rational mind generation concerned with reproduction but slipping into replication beulah which is concerned with um love but can also morph into hate unless you have access to his fourth state which he called eden or eternity which is his transcendent state both enabling us to transcend ourselves and particularly ourselves in those earlier states of mind but also giving us the fullest access to the divine through the use of the imagination that's his four-fold vision as opposed to the one two and threefold visions of the early estates and then through coleridge who was uh near contemporary of blake um we had the famous remark about how the imagination actually is actually sharing in the divine imagination the divine creativity and that when our imagination produces things that last and that are productive and we're sharing in the divine mind as opposed to when they're just fantastical and fun so nothing wrong with that per se but a very different uh quality of imagination which uh coderidge just called fantasy so that was sort of starting off point with those two huge figures and then last week we talked about carl jung and in a way i think the key thing that carl jung brings um again taking the imagination absolutely seriously it's the central human faculty for young as well but particularly being a psychotherapist um it's about understanding our own inner lives and then once we gain a certain understanding of that in all their complexity and then we can perhaps part start to perceive the more objective aspects of the psyche um so jung gives us um a lot of tools and the things that have happened since young's time have developed those tools even further to understand and discern and so not just trust the imagination unthinkingly unknowingly but to be able to develop it and run with it and particular sense this edge where our own insights about our ourselves start to show through um insights um maybe about um the cosmos around us maybe about the divine as well and that crucial process i mean you might say that jung i think um remakes the spiritual journey which say monks and nuns and spiritual adepts of previous eras would have gone about in different ways and this evening i want to come to owen barfield because what barfield gives us um i think it's a kind of big story for the imagination he too realized that it's the absolutely crucial human faculty but what he also gave us is um the overarching picture of why and where the imagination must might take us um and to cut to the chase i think you can summarize what he came to realize by saying that it's not that we have imagination as if it's something that our brains or our lives give us in isolation and if we're lucky help us to inject some meaning into another wise meaningless cosmos he saw it actually exactly the other way around he thought that the imagination has us and that when we exercise and enjoy and pursue our imaginative lives we're coupling to that wider interiority so as he put it in a very beautiful remark i think um our inner lives can connect with the inside of the whole world that's what our imagination enables us to do to link in with the divine imagination so he's very much in this cola regian tradition aaron indeed um wrote a book about coleridge um very clearly recognizing that um he was also very influenced in his thought by rudolf steiner the esotericist and founder of anthroposophy and whilst i'm not going to say anything very explicit about steiner this evening if any of you know anything about steiner you'll probably hear the echoes of the way that steiner would put things he has his own language in his own way of putting things um but certainly when barfield had recognized the centrality of the imagination in human life he then discovered the writings of rudolf steiner and even heard him talk once and uh i think grey gained great sort of sucker from that and realized that steiner in his own way had developed and taken things um enormously far as well and so became a great influence upon him and then the third group i just wanted to mention um that owen barfield influenced as well as being influenced by were the inklings um so this is the group that most famously included c s lewis and j r r tolkien and they're interesting in their own way and because in some ways c.s lewis was well barfield called him or they called each other their oppositional friends um they they argued and fought and worried and and collaborated trying to work out the full extent of the imagination and broadly speaking owen barfield was on the side of the imagination being a primary if not the primary human faculty whereas c.s lewis was more inclined to think that reason was more important and it could be illuminated by imagination um so they were close but they had their differences whereas i think j.r or tolkien was much more on barfield's side he really trusted the imagination and in his great work the lord of the rings thought that he was engaging in the divine imagination which he called sub-creation and so i think that's why the lords of the rings feels like a complete cosmos unto itself whereas cs lewis you're always nearly always any way aware that he's using his very powerful imagination but to illuminate things that in a way he has trusted by other means and in particular by his reason and by his faith so those three points i hope give you at least some sense of owen barfield and where he's coming in he he lived for a large large part of the 20th century um born in 1898 died in 1997 um and said he had one big idea which was to do with the imagination he discovered it because he was a philologist he worried and wondered a lot about the way that words work and how words change their meaning over the course of the centuries and realizing that words have an inner life themselves a kind of soul that communicates to us so with luck when you hear me speaking you don't hear random noises um you do hear words and moreover you hear words that carry some meaning and maybe even take you into different worlds um and that's because words have soul and that's because they engage the human imagination and bring that interiority to life and guide it and forge it and shape it that's how he came to his realization about the imagination and then developed it further now he has this story for the imagination and it works i think at least at two interlocking levels and so i thought i could say something about that now um the first level actually i've talked about before um in a previous century trust talk um and but just to rehearse it again now barfield studied texts because he was so interested in words and in particular he studied text over the last three thousand or so years because it's roughly over that time that we have sophisticated texts in myths particularly so reaching back to the earliest parts of the hebrew bible homer and those texts around the mediterranean particularly interested him and he realized that if you look at those texts you can track shifts of consciousness what he called an evolution of consciousness and in particular he thought that the very earliest parts of those texts show human beings having what he called original participation so that means that they shared in the life of others the cosmos the gods the world around them in an immersive way they as a word didn't have to wrestle with whether there's meaning they knew that there was meaning and the great challenge was how to navigate that meaning which kind of flooded into them from the outside in and they tended not to talk about the imagination in the way that we do as i've said before actually imagination was much more a theory of optics back then how we received the imago and so see rather they talked about inspiration and so for example if you read plato on poetry he will tell you that the muse inspires you and poets would call on the muses um to speak to them to channel um poetry and words and insights and myths so that was the experience of original participation um barfield realized that um we go through phases of alienation where that participation withdraws as he puts it and in fact that's why we think of figures like plato and socrates are so key and others like jesus um maybe in other axial figures too like the buddha you could say in lao tza in the darius tradition um and they become so significant for us because they are the kind of original wrestlers with this experience of being to some degree or rather cut off from this spontaneous immersion this spontaneous inspiration and the trouble that causes the questions of meaning it raises but it has an upside it always has an upside for barfield because what it does is it intensifies our sense of individuality and with figures like socrates with figures like um later judaism and christianity the sense of being an individual as we know it now starts to emerge that consciousness starts to emerge and the task subtly shifts to regaining participation by processes that barfield called reciprocal participation or final participation where we much more consciously and self-consciously regain a sense of being part of the cosmic imagination of the divine life and that return um has the great advantage that um we know ourselves as individuals sharing in the divine life and so things like incarnation become possible um in the christian sense and that individuals can know themselves as humans but also as fully transparent to the divine the way um archetypically set by jesus um so that's farfield's kind of story in almost historical time beginning at the edges of prehistory um into historical time um he also has a cosmic story um which um is more at the edges of his thoughts and does borrow on other figures like particularly the neo-platonists rudolf steiner and others but i wanted to put it together for you um in this way because in a way it's the biggest story that i know where the imagination plays this key role of powering um enabling the perception of this bigger story and i'm going to shift here to try and share um a couple of slides to show this so let me get this up now i hope that you can see um a new slide and could someone give me a thumbs up just to say that you can see that thanks very much um so this is maybe a familiar picture actually this is one of the ways that modern physicists and cosmologists in particular represent the story of the cosmos from the big bang and the part of the diagram i want to draw attention to this evening is the phase changes in this story um so it starts right on the left hand side there where it says quantum fluctuations um with the cosmos emerging out of nothing now there's some debate about this nothingness i mean actually in this diagram it says quantum fluctuations which suggests there's a quantum field um before the big bang out of which the big bang emerges but anyway it comes out of um a point of infinite density and infinite smallness um our our cosmos emerges and as it expands very quickly to start with start with with that period of inflation there it goes through various phase changes where gradually details of the material world as modern physics has revealed them start to emerge so first of all you get partic particles emerge and so this is subatomic particles like electrons and photons and the afterglow of the big bang and starts to stabilize and be possible to be seen um then you get atoms um these start to form dust clouds which gives to a new phenomenon in the cosmos of galaxies vast vast dust clouds and then within those dust clouds um start to collois and form stars and that enables particular nuclear fusion to take place where the very primitive atoms and particles of the early cosmos start to be able to form more complex atoms and particles and you might well have heard that the carbon in our bodies for example was formed in the nuclear reactions of these stars and so carbon is quite a complex atom compared to say a hydrogen atom and certainly compared to an electron or a photon so that's another phase change with stars and then you get galaxies sorry then you get planets that form around these stars as well um we're kind of maybe about a third of the way along and this funnel and with planets starts to emerge the possibility of terrestrial chemistry much more sophisticated chemistry and that starts to signal another sort of shift phase change because that kind of chemistry takes place at a lot lower temperatures than the earlier states of the cosmos and so something new emerges then and then you get a further phase change which is the emergence of biology somehow out of a warm soup of organic chemistry the story goes emerged life and you get biological chemistry biological life um with all its difference is compared to the earlier phases of the cosmos really quite a radical break um you know perhaps that occurred about um four billion years ago on this planet um the universe itself is 13.7 billion years old so life is probably older than that if it exists elsewhere and but it certainly marks another phase change and then as biology gets more complicated you get more sophisticated animals appearing and eventually culture as we know it starts to appear and maybe even language on top of that but these are the kind of instincts and habits which are shared by groups of animals and eventually merge into culture as we know it and then finally on the right hand side there with this open-ended funnel you have the future and broadly speaking at the moment the idea is that culture continues it develops it particularly develops technologically um and with greater technology but perhaps comes all sorts of new possibilities and who knows maybe new face changes as well but the distant future of our cosmos is now generally thought to be one of gradual cooling into the almost infinite distant future because it looks like this material cosmos is expanding and accelerating because of what's known as the dark energy so there's something of the big bang story and um the thing i want to draw attention to particularly is this notion of the phase changes and how different things emerge at different points in this story that really couldn't have been anticipated before but the consciousness big story is significantly different um i think actually this story from physics can be wrapped up into it as i'll try and indicate um but it's broadly different because whereas this story of the big bang sees increasing complexity giving rise to these different phase changes and ultimately leading to a complexity that we call consciousness and self-consciousness in animal life and our life the consciousness big bang story if you like argues that consciousness must have always already been there because consciousness can't actually just emerge out of nothing and that rather what happens as the story unfolds is that it's not consciousness that emerges but greater freedom emerges and moreover that freedom leads to a kind of return so let me say something more about that now i hope you can see this new picture now and this is going to be my way of trying to tell this story as i say it's a bit of an amalgam but i hope it captures a lot of details anyway and the words i'm going to use are not completely strict sometimes people use different words but i hope it gives you a sense of what the imagination and its biggest scope its biggest expanse enables us to traverse so this story begins with in the platonic tradition it came to be called the one and the one is a kind of present vitality undifferentiated um aboriginal god's head if you like um it's the dao that cannot be named perhaps and i put it there at the top of the screen in this whiteness before anything of differentiation emerges and we're going to move down the screen and as we move down the screen complexity and creativity will start to unfold but consciousness and freedom will be lost until the return gradually that's the broad dynamic and the one in this story spontaneously emanates because part of the oneness is it is excessiveness is abundance is giving it can't if you like help but overflow and maybe the first sense of that overflowing is what might be called the logos and this is the capacity of the one to reflect on itself to have mind to have consciousness of itself um it might also be called the intellect not intellect in our rational sense but intellect in the sense of becoming aware of resonating some kind of experience you might even say of this oneness and that gives rise to a third element which we might call spirit and this is in a way what's known by the one and the logos in their beautiful exchange and the third thing spontaneously appears which is what's known um in the protonic edition it might be the ideas or the forms um it might even at this stage be not just spirits but the very highest angelic intelligences as well that dance in the christian myth at least um right around the throne of god the seraphim and the cherubim but it doesn't stop there this is a continual emanation and outpouring and you can say i think that it also gives rise to so fear in a fourth move and this comes with a certain complexity now um which gives rise to wisdom so it's not just knowing not just contemplation but a kind of almost know-how a wisdom the the angelic tension intelligences that you might call powers and principalities emerge at this point as well as sophia herself um and you might even say this is the beginning of soul as we know it um a kind of vitality that has dynamic um dynamism to it that can find its way through things um and in particular know its way back to the divine back to god so these four elements are you can imagine them in a kind of um four-fold vision mutually sharing co-mingling might be the blakey and phrase we're still very much in um the period before time we're in eternity here but it gives rise to creation um it gives rise to manifesting in a way life or states of being beyond itself um creation as we start to experience and know most directly i think one manifestation of this might be matter and it might also be pattern that which sometimes gets called the laws of nature um the things that start to get manifest in the cosmos as we directly know it and who knows perhaps in an infinite number of cosmos is elsewhere as well and this is where we kind of wrap up with the story of physics is beginning to tell us to some degree at least recognizing that we're not talking about complexity giving rise to consciousness um but nonetheless complexity does give rise to life um in its instinctual senses first of all um and then with its co-creative senses as well um and then also perhaps even in us with its self-consciousness as well and maybe even language and that crucial part certainly of our consciousness sharing in the divine logos um for we humans at least life appears but with this um also comes mortality um i mean early life actually if you think about it single cellular life in particular which was the longest lasting life on the planet um in a way is eternal um it reproduces by division not by sexual reproduction um and so keeps on going in that way it's a kind of eternity that replication and but with more sophisticated sorts of life comes death as well as sexual reproduction certainly as we human beings know it relationship seems to be intimately tied with the experience of death and dying beginnings and ends um i'll say more about that towards the end but also with that comes a sense of ignorance comes what in the christian situation might be called the fall comes suffering as well um we're sort of moving into the darker lower ends of the picture now and this though starts to precipitate a turn this would be barfield's sense of the alienation of the original participation of life but the alienation is also has its own as a word secret story that starts to turn about um because that alienation enables the individual and so enables a sense of awakening a sense that there can be turning points in life that there can be incarnation that at least in human beings we can know ourselves as fully human and capable of being transparent to the divine as well and so this leads to a fur another move which is return um and this is the important u-shape to this story um it's not linear like the big bang story if you can just make out the use that i try to indicate with those arrows um it's a return to the one but a return with difference so it's not just as it were straight back up the central line um it's a return with difference and in particular what you start to see is unity in diversity rather than in just the oneness so the story here would be that um as we become more and more fully ourselves we don't actually become more and more isolated from others but we realize our harmony our individual dance with other things throughout the cosmos and it's that which leads to our return so consciousness and freedom takes on new qualities as well it knows harmony for example um as well as complexity and creativity taking on this notion of unity and diversity and so you have these wonderful mutual exchanges now this perhaps we just get intimations of and maybe it's just a few spiritual adepts the spiritual geniuses of our times that see this more and more fully and try to communicate it and show it and transmit it to others but this is i think um the rather wonderful biggest story um that owen barfield drawing on others but the thing i love about barfield is that um he gives it sort of evidence in a way because of his looking at words and he saw this in the very language which we speak he saw this transition and say was able to connect the more immediate 3000 years of historical life with this older story that spiritual adepts have been telling for quite some time um and there's something lovely about that because it means that our time has a particular contribution to make to this story um which i'll try and say something about now i want to say something um in a sort of more negative vein about how to discern this bigger picture and how do we know um that we are focused on it that we're understanding it that it might be even unfolding in our own experience and one of the ways that barfield thought you couldn't tell the difference between the linear story which tends to dominate um the cultural discourse certainly in the west now of the big bang um with the u-shaped story um is by what he's called watching out for residues of positivism um and positivism is the broadly philosophy of modern science and in particular um it is the philosophy that lies behind this sense of linear emergence a more common phrase of putting it would be to watch out for spiritual materialism which broadly speaking is the tendency to collapse um what properly belongs to these wider realms of consciousness of spirit of which matter is a manifestation to collapse that multi-dimensional picture onto the one dimension of matter and see spirit and consciousness as perhaps epi phenomena of material processes um now one of the ways you can tell this is going on is when people talk about the imagination as representing the world to us rather than enabling us to become co-creators with um the divine life um so emmanuel kant for example in his theory of the imagination he says that what imagination enables us to do is to kind of build up images of the world around us but they really only exist in our own minds and if we're lucky they're more or less accurate and so give us a sense of connection to what he called the thing in itself but we can't know the thing in itself he said because our imagination just gives us representations so barfield and coderidge and others would say that's completely wrong um the imagination because it holds us it's not that we have it it does give us access to the thing in itself and so enables us to become participants in the divine life and in particular to become co-creators with it um he thought that um there's a tendency to psychologize the imagination as well as if it just exists you know inside our own heads or perhaps inside us as a species um and he he actually critiqued jung quite heavily at times for at times doing this and i think in some ways jung did do this at times um you know jung could speak just as a psychologist and when he was addressing certain audiences and particularly it was only later in his life that he himself became more expansive and gave up the psychologising tendency but if you hear someone say you know the imagination is a product of our mind or maybe our group mind and you'll know that they're suffering from spiritual materialism this residue of positivism and they're not attaching to the fuller story um it's wedded to progress rather than to return um and this is again quite a widespread idea it's not just that we live in a civilization that's deeply ready to progress imagined as linear growth but in quite a lot of psychology even spiritual psychology this is quite a dominant idea um sometimes it's known as developmental theories of the self um that begin with infancy that have been extended into adult life and in some um writing can even be extended into spiritual life um and barfield was wary of that because they he thought still are hung up on progress and the linear or maybe cyclical patterns even and but they've lost or haven't regained touch with this u-shape of return which he felt was so important another way that spiritual materialism creeps in is by what you might say confusing techne with telos to use two smart sounding greek words tech name meaning not just technology but the human ability to manipulate and control the world more generally and confusing advances in that realm with the telos the true end the true final participation to which were genuinely headed now this pops up um very overtly with say stories of the singularity which is one of the stories that comes out of silicon valley that broadly speaking literal technology will one day become consciousness conscious and enable us to gain things like immortality um that barfield would say is a form of spiritual materialism um but he even critiqued quite close fellow spirits like pierre taya deshardan who too has a story of the evolution of consciousness and directly connects it to the divine but he thought that the shadow at times gets too enamored with technology in the story he tells and in particular de chardan's notion of the new sphere a kind of technological wrap which will enable the linking of consciousness around the earth he thought that um it's dangerous even actually and if you actually read extensively to chardan um this can pop out sometimes because for example he rather celebrates what in another guys you might think of as the rape of the earth um he celebrates the extension of field and factory across the earth willy-nilly um he even celebrated um the detonations of the atomic bombs because he saw in the flash of the nuclear energy and information of the flash of light of the divine and that confusion i think is because he confused technos with telos he confused human self-motivated power and ability with um the kind of participation in divine life which actually is about self-giving and opening blake's notion of self-annihilating even which i'll say something about shortly so watch out for these spiritual materialisms even in seemingly spiritual discourse um and then just the final point um if you ever hear people talking about consciousness emerging i've talked about consciousness emerging in the big bang story when mata gets complex enough um a quite popular idea of this that does the rounds at the minute is pan psychism the idea that there's kind of proto-primitive aspects of consciousness even in single atoms that full consciousness emerges out of when atomic structures get more get complicated enough well it's not a bad story and maybe it's a breaking down of strict materialism which would even deny the existence existence of consciousness um but it has the limitation um that it doesn't appreciate you might say um the bath of consciousness that we are born into which in a way is shaping um the whole thing and which matter and complexity is a manifestation of enabling the freedom of return so watch out for those things does the imagination represent rather than create is there a psychologising tendency is there a an adherence to progress rather than return a confusion of techne with telos and then the sense that um of pan psychism again as well an emergent story now to say more about this final participation if we've done a little bit at least of discerning when when we're kind of moving off track from the biggest story um i don't think this is unfair to barfield to say that he himself um was less clear about what final protest participation was about um figures like rudolph steiner were a lot clearer except that they're actually quite hard to understand um for people like me at least anyway um so what i wanted to do was kind of gather together my best intimations particularly from reading bar field as to what this final participation might be like um barfield was very influenced by christianity um he was a christian of sorts um you know again there's no um i'm not reading into him there he saw christ as a pivotal point in this story um the marker of redemption and the beginning of return um and in a way the extension of the incarnation therefore i think must be a crucial part of this story of final participation and this ends to which we're all moving in one way or another and that means that more and more people will become conscious of the divine within and will achieve what might variously be called awakening or enlightenment might um know themselves aligned more with the divine aspect of themselves rather than say with the mortal aspect of themselves and all the suffering that that brings so the incarnation is a crucial indicator um and pointer of the broad direction um i think it is to become not just extinct instinctive in our consciousness and which we certainly are at times and when we look across the animal world we see a lot of instinctive consciousness it's to become co-creative and that partly means becoming incapable of introducing novelty into the world um i think the generations of animals and maybe darwinian evolution could be fitted in here as one of the mechanisms that we see that brings about this novelty um but with the the addendum that um it's not the blind forces of um darwinian evolution uh the as the official story at least is um but it's um the way in which well actually as a by an evolutionist called simon conway morris at cambridge university puts it he sees evolution as seeking and searching and enjoying delighting in all the niches that exist in the cosmos and those niches are not just physical niches like say the sea or the sky which the fish and the birds have exploited but immaterial niches as well and in particular conway morris argues that there must be a moral set of niches in the cosmos which are where the good the beautiful and the true can be found and we human beings in our evolution have become good and maybe will become even better uh exploiting those niches they become part of our life quite as much as terra firma the good beautiful and true but there's a third element here which is what you might call love or spiritual rapport where we don't just know our own life in its wonderful ways but that we start to appreciate more and more the life of other creatures round and about us um other entities round and about us other intelligences is rounded about us and the divine rounding about us as well and so to recall barfield's expression again we get to know the inside of the whole world as well as our own inside um i think this often comes about with blake's notion of self-annihilation um and this is um blake's understanding that we must first of all cultivate our sense of ourselves but at some point and maybe for quite a long time be simultaneously trying to overcome ourselves so that our striving to become individuals are striving to become human with all the anxiety and suffering that that brings the mix of feelings the contraries um which the romantics were so good on you know the love and the hate um that gradually that gets burnt out of us and so that we become more and more transparent to what's good beautiful and true um but there's no sidestepping i don't think the bottom of the u um the struggle with mortality the struggle with redemption but so that we can become not just alienated but individuals who can self-consciously receive this grace can step on this return that's part of the subtlety um of our journey and i think blake was on to this and others have been as well um a figure that i'm increasingly interested in actually um is the russian philosopher and vladimir solaviov um who barfield wrote about as well so lovely off and he talked about what he called an inner apocalypse um and i like this idea because the apocalypse is normally talked about as an intervention in history by god in christian circles that would be talked about as the return of christ and but salvia realized that that in a way suffers from spiritual materialism and that what we need to try and see more clearly is an inner apocalypse where apocalypse you know means the unveiling of truth where that gradually actually happens in our imagination in our inner life and that when we realize that it's already occurred you might say um in the inner life of all things around us that's why jesus actually said um people will say when's the when is the end times going to be you know when will the return of the messiah and he said to people they will look here they will look there but i tell you the kingdom of god is already within you and that is the inner apocalypse of sylvia and i think barfield can really help us flesh out what that might be about another element which i think is really important which the imagination can get to grips with and a lack of imagination really struggles with is the notion of sacrifice and again you see a kind of evolution of the notion of sacrifice that it used to be thought of as an external thing you know originally in the sacrifice of animals maybe even of humans in some traditions to facilitate relating to the deities to the gods but with the appearance of this axial age of which jesus has won um you see actually very clearly in the hindu tradition here in the bhagavad gita where sacrifice becomes an inner gesture that the individual is invited constantly to be making and it's receiving life and receiving your own life living your own life really fully making something of your own life but constantly offering it back to the divine life from whence it came and so it's about living in the present it's about imaginatively realizing that your life and death is actually held within a wider process a wider life and so sacrifice comes to be seen as this continual offering of oneself back to the divine and it means that the storehouse of your life actually can increasingly be experienced as in the divine life itself and so this sacrifice is expansive expansive of yourself um you know it's to put it another way it's in the little depths of the everyday the beginnings and the ends the little kindnesses as blake put it that we experience this at one in one way and when we become familiar with that in life it means i think that the final death of our mortality can actually just be seen as a phase change back to the divine life um i think figures like socrates knew this when they were writing the fido um maybe i'll just end with um a couple of um poetic invocations of this because i think one of the reasons that poetry is so important is that the way it puts words together the way it releases the soul and the inner life of words this is very much barfield's understanding um is that it gives us intimations and glimpses of this biggest picture of the imaginative life um here's a few lines from blake from blake's is of innocence um and orga is of course means the capacity prophetically to tell the future and the word innocent for blake after experience means returning to the divine life and so these are cutlets that he put together they're very well known that i don't think are supposed to be read as moral couplets as they sometimes can be and but rather they're supposed to spark our imagination and invite us to go right to that edge of our minds where we can barely know what we're hearing and yet somehow know it's the direction into which we're being called and so listen to these couplets and register how they can be moral injunctions but then registered do they actually work on my imagination to take me to a different possibility and experience of life here are three of them a robin red breast in a cage puts all heaven in a rage each outcry of the hunted hair a fiber of the brain does tear a skylark wounded in the wing a cherubim does cease to sing and he very often makes links to heavenly entities even while something is happening on earth and i think that is the clue that these aren't just expressions of outrage against unnecessary killing say which is certainly so but as it were that outrage is seen to be based on the ignorance of life and so when blake says for example a skylight wounded in the wing a cherubim does cease to sing he's making the link there back to the return to the divine life and that's what these orders of innocence invite us to consider and let me just read one final um quote from another poet who's really on to this in his own way and is actually a wonderful poet and quite well known i'm increasingly becoming known i hope i like him because he's english as well and so writes directly um to our first language i guess for most of us at least here this evening is the figure of thomas trahearne and here's a phrase a passage from his christian ethics which i hope captures some of what i've been saying and i'll leave it with you before we move to questions the sun is a glorious creature and its beams extend to the utmost stars by shining on them it clothes them with light and by its rays exciteth all their influences it enlightens the eyes of all the creatures it shineth in 40 kingdoms at the same time on seas and continents in a general manner yet so particularly regardeth all that every moat in the air every grain of dust every sand every spire of grass is wholly illuminated thereby as if it did entirely shine upon that alone nor does it only illuminate all these objects in an idle manner its beams are operative entering in filling the pores of all things with spirits and impregnate them with powers cause all their emanations odors virtues and operations springs rivers minerals and vegetables are all perfected by the sun all the motion life and sense of birds beasts and fishes dependeth on the same and i hope that captures some of this wonderful vision of unity in diversity and that harmony that freedom which i think is the consciousness beckoning us to return

Channel: Mark Vernon

Views: 6,845

Keywords: Owen Barfield, Fintry Trust, Imagination, Spiritual Sight, Barfield, William Blake, Carl Jung, Mark Vernon, Spiritual Materialism, Panpyschism, Chardin

Id: ntJBo9vwRHc

Length: 48min 58sec (2938 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 05 2020