For those who don’t want yet another introduction, this is probably the best online discussion of Barfield’s “one book,”reiterated over the course of his long and fruitful life. The conversation is truly an exercise in Barfieldian thinking, not Barfieldian thought.

Wonderful talk thank you Mr. Vernon

About freedom. “We think having more choices is freedom.” This is spot on! This runs parallel to imagination as well. We think of imagination as embellishment, when in actuality it is exploring our limitations to find the miraculous. See Goethe’s Metamorphosis of Plants.

Great video. Thanks for providing a platform for these wonderful voices (especially Max! :)). As Barfield says at the end of his Saving the Appearances, p141: Steiner showed that imagination, and the final participation it leads to, involve, unlike hypothetical thinking, the whole man-thought, feeling, will, and character-and his own revelations were clearly drawn from those further stages of participation Inspiration and Intuition-to which the systematic use of imagination may lead.

Enjoy these conversations --- I love Rudolf Steiner but he is very tough to figure. Right now I am listening to Steiner discussing the human central nervous system -- he says the way it is described today with sensory and motor skills is so far off from how it really works that in the future people will laugh that this is how we thought it worked. So, Steiner says it is at the nervous system where we have the meeting of the material world and our spiritual being -----

In ways helpful discussion...voluminous strands of ideas to sift through... more discursive and wide-roaming than my hopes of emerging with a coherent body of understanding, at any level, of Barfield's thought... Thanks to Landon who did try to drive it back to their work and Barfield's thought...

What a fantastic conversation - I've been totally sucked in and couldn't stop watching (and will have to watch and listen again). Thank you so much for this and for sharing.

Such a joy to listen to these lovely men!

What a valuable conversation! I'm all the more eager now to read Landon's and Max's book.

This was excellent Mark, you all participated, Barfield has some books that are in the form of dialogue, so this was really an apposite form. I made a few videos on Barfield because I thought his ideas were well formulated but they had not been sufficiently engaged with and by people discussing his ideas in a creative way as happens here, the ideas live and hopefully get more cultural purchase. I also thought it a bit funny that I gave you some stick about the absence of Steiner in your book on Barfield when in this conversation, you seemed to be pushing for discussion about Steiner and it seemed you were met with reluctance to do so.

"Imagination is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow." - William Blake

Fantastic conversation. Again tho I have to wonder how much of this thought from Barfield and Lewis came from George MacDonald. I would refer you all to his essay The Imagination; It’s Function and Culture. I’ve read so many of the ideas expressed here, in that essay. Poetry becoming mummies of prose, imagination as a truth bearing faculty etc. I realize Coleridge, Goethe and others also shared these perceptions but MacDonald lays it all out so succinctly in his essay. Of course always giving credit where credit is due.

That is a great conversation. Thank you all three of you.

Thank you. Helpful passage: "What we understand by the word nature simply did not exist before man differentiated out of it. What we see now is a polarization of man on the one side and nature on the other." The psychophysical exercises of Michael Chekhov can be an effective antidote...

Well said and well done. Thanks

From Lilith by George MacDonald…. "How long must they flaunt their facelessness in faceless eyes?" I wondered. "How long will the frightful punition endure? Have they at length begun to love and be wise? Have they yet yielded to the shame that has found them?"

Outstanding!

Re-imagination of the Self (Max ca 27:00). Now there's a pithy idea that I want to use more often.

Poetry. The word becomes flesh. Fully God and fully man.

Absolutely wonderful discussion! Thank you all SO much. I am reading your new book slowly, with much thought, atm. I'd love to hear more from you all about Barfield & Steiner (I've struggled with the latter for decades, reading & attending many anthroposophical events at Michael Hall, Tobias & Emerson colleges in Sussex & elsewhere, but vacillating between extremes in my opinion / attitude towards him. I would really appreciate more eloquent exposition of his ideas in your wonderfully fluent, articulate English. Unfortunately, even after studying mainstream metaphysics, I could make no coherent sense of 'Philosophy of Freedom' on my own. Yet I have been drawn to him since my 20s.) Please could one of you explain why Barfield chose a tripartite take on the developmental stages of consciousness? Is it because of the 'magic' / mystical threefold nature of God in Christianity & the number necessary for manifestation in numerology across cultures? (that which is, a demarcation from that which it is not + a containing medium or universal set). Steiner spoke about cycles of 7 years each of a driving focus on Goodness, Beauty & Truth in human development that repeats throughout our lives ... is there any other rationale for this than the magical quality of 7? So why does Barfield stop at one set of three developmental phases (or does this repeat, on a higher turn of a spiral as it were, beyond what we see as 'final participation' ... as in the Hegelian thesis / antithesis / synthesis of his view of history? Might what we see as 'final' be the starter thesis of a higher cycle of these phases? Also: does Barfield believe in linear time: in birth / growth & reproduction / decay & death (as experienced & described by us) as ultimate, rather than cosmic 'time' that always IS, enfolding aspects of all Reality in Eternity?

Thank you.

Excellent. I have been waiting to hear more from Landon Loftin since @keriford54 read one of his papers. Thank you all for sharing this. Piece by piece I continue to gain a better understanding of Barfield, Steiner and this wonderful creation of which I am a part.

I have to share this quote from the essay……. “We must begin with a definition of the word imagination, or rather some description of the faculty to which we give the name. The word itself means an imaging or a making of likenesses. The imagination is that faculty which gives form to thought--not necessarily uttered form, but form capable of being uttered in shape or in sound, or in any mode upon which the senses can lay hold. It is, therefore, that faculty in man which is likest to the prime operation of the power of God, and has, therefore, been called the creative faculty, and its exercise creation. Poet means maker. We must not forget, however, that between creator and poet lies the one unpassable gulf which distinguishes--far be it from us to say divides-- all that is God's from all that is man's; a gulf teeming with infinite revelations, but a gulf over which no man can pass to find out God, although God needs not to pass over it to find man; the gulf between that which calls, and that which is thus called into being; between that which makes in its own image and that which is made in that image. It is better to keep the word creation for that calling out of nothing which is the imagination of God; except it be as an occasional symbolic expression, whose daring is fully recognized, of the likeness of man's work to the work of his maker. The necessary unlikeness between the creator and the created holds within it the equally necessary likeness of the thing made to him who makes it, and so of the work of the made to the work of the maker. When therefore, refusing to employ the word creation of the work of man, we yet use the word imagination of the work of God, we cannot be said to dare at all. It is only to give the name of man's faculty to that power after which and by which it was fashioned. The imagination of man is made in the image of the imagination of God. Everything of man must have been of God first; and it will help much towards our understanding of the imagination and its functions in man if we first succeed in regarding aright the imagination of God, in which the imagination of man lives and moves and has its being.” - George MacDonald Edit: I’m not sure why some of this comment is crossed out. This was not done by me and I can’t seem to correct it. 🤷🏼‍♀️

@samwilt5620

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wow what a quote. well paired with the video @shari6063

Imagination is never 'just' imagination- John G Bennett

"Freedom for man means being a servant to God" is so true but such a hard concept to promote in this world. People don't understand the relief and naturalness of that kind of submission. “You thought, as a boy, that a mage is one who can do anything. So I thought, once. So did we all. And the truth is that as a man's real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do. . . .” ― Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea

I’m surprised there’s no mention of D. H. Lawrence who’s Rainbow-Women in Love covers this very matere....

Part of the central practical importance of Steiner's understanding of Christ is that humanity can develop the capacity to use willed awareness itself to know other beings, whether by receiving imaginations, meanings, or experiences of what's its like to be them... this is not an action of the intellect, but the use of the light that knows by a loving becoming of what it's interested in. The free use of form-free awareness as the cognition of the Higher Self, which knows-by-being, is Christ consciousness and the future compassionate clarevoyence for humankind. This experience is an experience of the living world, living thinking, vs the dead world that we think we know through the logical reassembly of facts into abstract models and concepts. Seeing the world through these concepts is extinguishing the vitality of the real world and what makes the physical world appear to be an illusion. Developing the willed use of free awareness is the way to final participation; this is developing spiritual senses that are the inner correlate to the physical senses that we need to develop through daily effort and exercises.

The word imagination is too loaded to be helpful in trying to convey what is being proposed. Or perhaps not ?Maybe that is the function of Christianity itself to ‘save((or exhaust) the appearances’ ( the three ‘magi’ at the birth of Christ anyone?)...rather than move beyond them as other traditions do? God is the only reality ,he is imagining himself through us, the less of our own ‘imagination’ we project into reality the more we become a mirror through which his greater truths are reflected.Also regarding music, lewis most profound deliberations on this issue are in the one of the trilogy novels,perlandara i think?..the music of the spheres is not music at all, it is not heard with the ears,or any of the ordinary senses,..i did experience this in a state once and very soon after read his description. The music of the world( even sublime works such bach and handel)is still within the illusionary and in fact only refraining from it and abiding in silence or chanting sacred mantras/zikr can we align ourselves to its rhythm. Perhaps

90 seconds in - pretty sure Marc’s got a PhD - as it’s been mentioned thrice!!! It must get exhausting ….