Barfield is a tough act to follow: Where we can go from here, now, Part 1
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| White Aspen, yellow leaves, Humphreys Peak, Arizona |
This is important to share, because it's just what I think is yet to be more fully revealed about Barfield himself (see Simon Blaxland's biography of Barfield for the fullest picture yet of the man), and about every honest, serious reader of Barfield's work.
Let me give context.
From my first encounter with Barfield's Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry, my reality shifted and warbled to a settled and clear focus, where the 'warbles' were new perceptions and experiences both profound and subtle, and happened with frequency and durability.
One experience, though not in a single moment: Soon after I'd read Lord of the Rings the first time, over the Christmas break of 1977, at 15 years old, I attempted, by external and naive pretense, to enter the realm of middle earth as experienced in the actual reading of the story. I egged on my friend and fellow reader to pretend with me that we were being chased by Black Riders.
The pretense failed; I felt no change of consciousness.
Just about ten years later, I read Saving the Appearances. I was a first-year high school science teacher, trying to come to terms with the story of the scientific revolution as it was repeated in the first chapter of every public school science textbook. It didn't add up, and I was on a mission to find out what was missing. A colleague genuinely and enthusiastically recommended Saving the Appearances.
Soon after my first deep reading, I found a new, seemingly bottomless thirst for history. And the history I encountered highlighted, detailed, complemented, or corroborated Barfield in many ways. In fact, it was having grown by the reading of Saving the Appearances, that I was even able to appreciate history.
So I was learning history, of human consciousness, of peoples, languages, legal and social systems. I heard echoes of one in another, across the globe and through time. One day, I'm finally reading Beowulf, in translation of course, for the first time. Not long into the first pages, I say to myself, and maybe even out loud, "This is Tolkien!"
I recognized something in both, and even recognized that this overlap, the similarity, didn't exhaust the experience, but that the two - Tolkien in LOTR, and the author of Beowulf - both, in their own measure, revealed a world as experienced by a portion of humanity either long before in time or profoundly dissimilar in quality from today. Just what Barfield had said was there.
I had more moments like this one, where I recognize something, or some being, some person, some human consciousness where I didn't before or never thought to look. Some instances followed a pattern: while reading historical accounts and analyses of accounts of different peoples, I would come across, and pay attention to, what those people themselves said about their own history.
That is, I would follow their lead, and the mode of their looking back, to get further back. I wouldn't simply, automatically, arbitrarily jump out of a sympathetic historical mood to then refer to the latest archeological evidence, not as added detail, but as the only detail of and evidence for what came before them.
I now call it 'the secret door through time,' because it elicits a change in consciousness.
This 'sympathetic historical mood' Barfield contrasted to "a bare history of ideas", meaning a logical, synchronic schematic of an argument, a concept, a method, or narrative, that even though we still discuss thousands of years after the fact, and after the rise and fall of peoples, languages, and cultures, we imagine that we argue with contemporaries, assuming silently all that we know and experience now, after all and because of, that. With mostly only straightforward technical adjustments needed, these conversations became intelligible, though not always enlightening: Aristotle on the categories, Jon Scotus Erigena on emanation, Locke on innate ideas, Kant on the manifold, Husserl on the epoche.
I once figurated the difference in the views of history:
The bare history of ideas correlated to what Barfield termed 'logomorphism', which, if we take to be the effective blocker of enlightenment, we'll take as our task to overcome. And if we take enlightenment to involve release from material existence, then, as Barfield puts it in Worlds Apart, there are only two ways to do that: die bodily, which will happen in any case; or be intiated.
Anyone can read, and understand, and criticize, analyze and comment on and appreciate Barfield's work, regardless of motives or background, philosophical or otherwise. To see as he saw - history bathed in the light of the evolution of consciousness - happens otherwise. That informs my study of his work, and has from the beginning.
Barfield's thinking 'worked' in other ways too: I found I could at least and initially grasp the major texts of the academic canon in philosophy at the time - I started grad school in 1989 - a canon that only a year prior I had known very little about, and had read almost nothing!
These moments were real. Not only that; they were repeatable, and repeating. Even from early on in my study of Barfield's work, I practiced meditation at various times, using different methods, to varying degrees. There has always been a flicker of interest in his ideas, and a passionate dedication to understanding and manifesting them.
So one day, only ten years ago, I meditated on the passage in Unancestral Voice where the Meggid is giving Burgeon his last lesson regarding the great tabu, which is one with the great illusion. I meditated on this, specifically, that the fundamental distinction in reality isn't between my body and the rest of the world, including other human bodies. Rather, the chasm is further on this side: there's me, then there's material reality, the entry point and anchor node of which is my body and the mind connected to it.
The instigation of this meditation was existential crisis. I was newly and unexpectedly unemployed. I was deeply depressed, and felt almost no substance to myself. As I meditated, and turned mind and heart inward, I imaginatively, deliberately undressed my Self, from outward, in:
That company that I worked in, isn't me. That 'role' or title is not me. That paycheck is not me. This apartment and its contents - not me. These clothes I'm wearing, the coffee I'm drinking, the scrambled eggs I'm eating, these aren't me either.
My transcript is not me. My resume isn't either. No legal records or documents have any claim to being me.
Then I got serious.
This white, Caucasian skin is not me. The blue eyes aren't me. The balding pate; the freckling skin; the bags under the eyes; none of these are me.
Not even the voice.
Not even the name.
...
Where do you go from there?
That's exactly the right question, in any case.
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