Amazon search box can't keep up...

I get a kick out of the Amazon search box trying to keep up with me when I'm typing "philosophy and the evolution of consciousness". You know how titles matching what you've typed flicker in a list below the text box, as you type? It always gives up around the middle of 'evolution' and goes blank...

I'm beginning in earnest to sketch out an essay tentatively titled 'Barfield, Tolkien, and the Language of Original Participation' that I'll be presenting at the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association annual conference. There will also be a meeting of the Owen Barfield Society, and Owen Barfield's grandson Owen A. Barfield will be in attendance.

This is a study that I have already accomplished on the Barfield side of the Barfield/Tolkien connection, in the book I published almost ten years ago, as well as in a variety essays and papers. But for the Tolkien side, I've only hinted at it. What I'm interested in getting at is how Tolkien and Barfield 'broke the veil...and passed through', as one of Tolkien's Oxford students put it. What veil did they break, and to what did they pass through?

I studied this closely for years with regard to Barfield's work on the evolution of consciousness, and I believe I actually saw glimpses of the world 'bathed in the light of original participation.' My philosophy professors thought I was crazy. They were genuinely confused by my work. While one professor - the most accomplished member of the faculty in terms of publications and recognition outside the university - conferred A's on my work, commenting that it was of a caliber near that of one particular well known living philosopher (and of a more lasting subject matter), another begrudged me a C and scornfully pronounced - in front of the rest of the faculty - that I'd come into the master's program 'a Barfieldian', and was leaving in the same condition.

This is because I was articulating a mode of perception - I could see these things, and they couldn't. I too had broke the veil and passed through, and not without consequence. First of all, I nearly went insane. I began, in the deepest years of my immersion in my studies, what has turned out to be a twenty year off-and-on dependence on anti-depressants. I couldn't turn off the thinking about, and pursuit of, 'the other side' even when I wanted to. I literally sat on the mountain side in Missoula, Montana, meditating on Barfield's work, and achieved moments of altered perception - and consequently of consciousness.

Second, the department refused to confer on me the title of Master of Philosophy, though I completed all requirements including the thesis. In fact, I'd come into the program as a provisional student due to my lack of undergraduate work in philosophy. By the end of my third year, I'd addressed the deficiencies, completed all other coursework, advanced in college level Latin, and written a complete, 125-page draft of my thesis. Four years and five or so drafts later (as well as some additional coursework), the department called it quits. And so did I. I was beat.

LOL... Had I broken through the veil? I'd broken something. I haven't been quite the same since. I've not achieved the intensity of the experiences of those days, when I was meditating on the mountain. Now, it is simply true for me that human consciousness was very different thousands of years ago, and the world was different too - consciousness and the external world are correlative, in an intricate and complicated and beautiful and chaotic dance.

What Barfield and Tolkien did was to trace some of the more intricate patterns and threads in the living fabric of world and consciousness. I want to try to figure out some specifics of how they did that. I have my meds handy, though I hope not to have to use them this time around.