Bruce Charlton's introduction to A Geography of Consciousness by William Arkle - Draft version (11/9/19)

Introduction to A Geography of Consciousness by Bruce G Charlton

William Arkle is not well known, indeed he could justifiably be called obscure; yet I regard him as the most recent representative of a lineage of Romantic authors and artists that could include William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Owen Barfield, CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien in England; Goethe, Novalis and Rudolf Steiner in Germany; and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman in the United States.

As a spiritual philosopher I see Arkle as fully worthy to stand with these illustrious names – because he brings something original, different and vital to the conversation. He provides something that we would not want to be without.

But although a writer of memorable paragraphs, an unique and elating painter, and an innovative composer; Arkle is not the match of his great predecessors in artistic achievement. He reaches his highest attainment in the abstract realms of metaphysical philosophy, which is always challenging to read. If you persevere with this book you will discover much that will stay in your recollection and enhance your life – but to gain this you must be prepared to work hard.

My part in the matter…

A Geography of Consciousness by William Arkle is a book of concentrated wisdom and enlightenment, which can make a very positive difference to life; it would perhaps be my first choice as a ‘desert island’ book – but it is also a difficult book that requires slow and focused study. My task here is to persuade you to make the sustained effort required to obtain the great rewards that this text offers!

Perhaps an account of my own experience with the work of William Arkle might serve as a bridge? At the age of eighteen I discovered Arkle, from a local BBC TV documentary; I learned that he was a painter and spiritual philosopher, a religious thinker, and something of a ‘guru’ who had attracted disciples from abroad. I was amazed to find that he lived only about a mile from me, through the woods and on top of the hill in Backwell, Somerset, England.

At that time I was a young atheist, training in science, aiming at medicine; and so, while I felt a fascination drawing me, I made no attempt to contact Arkle. Instead I asked a few questions about the family (my sister knew them, slightly); and tried, but failed, to find his writings in the Bristol bookshops or library system.

A year later my family had moved to Scotland, and I was pleased and surprised to find a copy of A Geography of Consciousness in the Edinburgh City Library; which I borrowed and read for the whole of the summer of 1978; but eventually it had to be returned. Yet there were parts of the book that made a permanent impact, lodging in memory – especially the image of awakening on a sunny morning, from the Foreword; which must have come to mind hundreds of times through my later life.

I was also fascinated by Colin Wilson’s assertion (from his introduction) that Arkle did not just write about the world of higher consciousness: he really lived it (confirming my impression from the TV programme). As the years went by I began to recognise how very rare this was; and how most writers and artists, including the very best, utterly fail to live-up-to their works. This made Arkle special, in the way that William Blake was special (and the comparison between Blake and Arkle was one that Colin Wilson had made).

However, I found myself put-off by Arkle’s use of geometry and physics as a metaphorical description – I just could not battle through these abstractions; because of my suspicion that on the other side was something that I could not accept from my atheist-scientist perspective. I was also averse to Arkle’s confident discussions of God and divinity (which, at that time, I could not even entertain as a possibility). In the end, A Geography of Consciousness instead made me attracted to the work of Colin Wilson. I began reading Wilson (starting with The Outsider) and have never stopped since! Yet I now regard Arkle as the greater man; a deeper and more important thinker, who went beyond Wilson.

I happened to be very good friends with Arkle’s nearest neighbours up on Backwell Hill, and after leaving Backwell I began to revisit and stay with them. One memorable evening I visited William Arkle’s son, Nick, to see his music studio and hear some of his compositions; and during this visit I briefly said hello to William, or ‘Bill’ as everyone called him.

If Bill had been alone and had had free time, perhaps this might have led to something (despite my continued suspicion of spiritual and religious matters); but he was walking from one place to another with a small group of people, clearly busy; so the entirety of my personal contact with William Arkle amounted to a brief introduction, an exchange of pleasantries! This non-event has long been a source of regret to me; although in my more realistic moods I acknowledge that I was then not ready for more.

But I do recall being very impressed by the house, and its vast ex-chapel covered with Arkle’s strange but evocative paintings; and evidence of all manner of creative work afoot. The place was buzzing, even in the evening; yet buzzing in a pleasant and meditative way, like a bumble bee... Arkle’s seemed like some sort of ideal life; secluded study, meditation and convivial living with his family and some friends and pupils. My brief experience confirmed Colin Wilson’s statement that Arkle lived in accordance with his ideals.  

My life then entered the early adult phase of focusing on work; in my case as a psychiatry researcher, lab scientist, literary scholar, and then a university lecturer. I lived at the other end of Britain and pretty much stopped visiting Backwell; and my interests became mainstream, and materialistic. 

But although I still failed to engage; Arkle did not go away. Whenever I was in a second-hand bookshop, I would take a look to see if I could get my own copy of A Geography of Consciousness. And eventually, some considerable time later, I was walking through Bloomsbury, London and saw a strange ‘mystical’ looking shop that I thought might possibly be carrying a copy. I walked in – and there it was, right in front of me! So I bought it, and began to feel (at the back of my mind, almost unwanted) that there might be some synchronicity drawing me to Arkle.

Even so, things did not really get-going until 2008, some thirty years after that first encounter; when I discovered extensive web pages (hosted created and hosted by Michael Perry) containing most of Arkle’s writings and paintings. This led, by stages, to a more and more intense engagement with Arkle’s writings; until some five years ago they took a place at the centre of my spiritual life.

Arkle is a Christian. He is, however, a very unusual Christian – as are several of the other Romantics I listed above – such as Novalis, Blake, Steiner and Barfield. One certainly does not need to be a Christian to get a great deal from Arkle - but I would say that Christians could potentially get the most from him; if they can get past the fact that he is non-denominational, unorthodox and heretical. But if not a Christian one does need to be someone who is at least prepared to entertain the possibility that we live in a creation, not a universe of merely accidental causal forces. The reader also needs to think it is at least possible that this ongoing creation originated in a loving personal God; such that each individual’s life has a purpose and a meaning.

If the reader is prepared to accept – at least hypothetically - the assumption that our reality was created by a loving God – then he is ready to start reading A Geography of Consciousness.

So, what can the reader expect to find in this book? In what follows I will draw-upon my understanding of Arkle’s philosophy, integrating information I have derived from the full range of his available prose works, as well as conversations with some of those who knew him.

The assumptions of A Geography of Consciousness

William Arkle lived by the belief that he had direct and personal knowledge both of the nature of reality of God the creator and of his own true and divine self. Knowledge of both God and the ‘real self’ was the basis upon-which his entire ‘system’ was built, and which guided his life. If Arkle’s writings could be boiled-down to a single, but two-pronged, piece of advice it would be that we all could live like this: if we so choose. 

Where does our real-self come from; and why is it valid? Arkle’s answer is that it originates as a fragment of the divine, a droplet of the ocean that is God, or a little flame from the cosmic fire that is God. This is the basis of the real self, and it is why we are literally children of God, since we inherit a part of God. However, the real self is also the product of our own, unique personal choices and experiences, and how we have learned from them.

For Arkle, this uniqueness is vital. God wants each of his children to be different, to be unique, to be an expression and development of his or her own nature. In sum; for Arkle the real self is both universal, because it has a part of God; and individual, because it is the product of unique experience.

Our destiny, our purpose – should we choose to follow it – is therefore also both universal and unique. Universal because we may all work together on creation and create for each-other in a spirit of love; unique because each person (God, human, angel) brings something absolutely distinctive and irreplaceable. Each ‘player’ has his own part in the symphony of the universe and adds a specific new voice to manifestation.

Arkle assumes, I think correctly, that all of our knowledge is always and necessarily built upon this basic intuition – if we are honest and rigorous enough to follow things to their root.

Most spiritual writers will, at this point, recommend some method or technique of meditation in order to achieve such intuition; but not Arkle. Arkle insists that there is no single method, but to the contrary each individual must ‘quarry out’ his own path for himself, by trial and error, by doing his best and learning from experience. Since the self we aim at is meant to be unique; the method for attaining it is likewise unique. Arkle emphasises that the difficulty of learning for oneself is not an accident, but part of the process, built-into God’s plan; because this is the best way to learn.

What we learn ‘the hard way’ is learned better – indeed, it is often the case that tough lessons are the only ones that work. And, for Arkle, this is the basic nature of this created world. This is a world where we get the lessons, some pleasant some tough (whatever works), individually-tailored for each person (as much as possible), that are needed for us to learn and grow toward higher levels of consciousness, higher levels of divinity.

For Arkle, this is a well-designed world; a world that is trying to teach us what we most need to know. But what is the purpose of this world – what is it trying to help us grow towards?  

Ultimate purpose: God’s yearning for grown-up friends

Arkle believed that God’s reason for creation was to manifest a universe in which his children (humankind and also angels) could develop towards higher levels of divinity, and eventually grow-up into what might be termed mini-gods – at the same level of development as God the creator.

For Arkle the ‘master metaphor’ – and indeed a literal reality at the spiritual level – is The Family. The ideal human Family (which we can imagine, even if we have not personally experienced) is the model for the universe; and provides an understanding of the goal of the universe.

At this point we need to recognise that for Arkle God is both Father and Mother: God is a ‘dyad’ of primal Heavenly Parents, whose children include all of humankind (and all the angels, whom Arkle regards as God’s children who begin in Heaven as helpers of God, and who work ‘down’ through incarnations away from divine influence and towards greater materiality; developing in the opposite direction from Men, but getting the same various life experiences in the end).

Because we are all members of a single Family; ultimately God, humans and angels are all of the same kind, and have the same ultimate possibility. We can all become creators, eventually – perhaps working with our Heavenly Parents and within our Heavenly Parents creation; perhaps manifesting other new creations.

So the Big Problem for God is how to create a universe in which spiritual children can grow-up to become mini-gods, on a level with our Heavenly Parents and choosing to work in harmony with our Heavenly Parents in continuing the work of creation. Behind all this is the very ‘human’ motivation of God to have others of his and her kind at God’s level, with whom to be friends. Thus God wants children, and hopes that at least some of these children will develop to spiritual adulthood, and choose to become God’s grown-up companions and collaborators.  

For Arkle, the word friend is loaded with significance – he sees the loving friendship of divine people as the highest goal of reality, and the highest form of relationship; because it is chosen voluntarily, and because it happens between those of equal stature. As an ideal, it is something at best glimpsed during this earthly, mortal life; but we can get an analogy from imagining the best possible outcome of a child growing-up in a loving family.

A child born into an ‘ideal’ family will be immersed in love, mostly passive and automatically responsive to the environment, and not fully conscious. As a child matures through adolescence into adulthood; he may achieve complete spiritual independence from the parents – a state of agency, of being an independent agent. At this point he becomes potentially ‘free’, and able to live consciously from his own inner knowledge and motivations; that is, from his real self, which is divine. Arkle’s concept of a ‘friend’ is when such a grown up, free, conscious child voluntarily chooses to return to a fully loving relationship with his parents; but now on a level (but complementary) footing, as one adult with another.

Both the young-child and the adult-child love the parents; but only the adult love is the freely chosen love between different-equals. Further, as with mortal humans, the parent-child relationship will always be maintained. God is creator of this reality; we grew inside this creation; so even if or when a human rises to the status of a mini-god or divine friend, and works with the Heavenly Parents on the continuing development and creation of this reality; it will be in the context of God’s already-existing primary creation.

It is in this sense that God has set-up creation, and hope that at least some of us humans will have experiences, make choices, learn and develop; and ultimately choose to become divine friends with the creator – still God’s children, but now grown up to share the same stature as our divine parents.

Growing-up to become deities - reincarnation

Arkle envisages this process has being, typically, a long and slow one; involving multiple smaller steps (which are described in some detail) and multiple incarnations (perhaps in several or many different ‘universes’).

So, Arkle is a proponent of reincarnation – in one of its many versions. For Arkle, the need for reincarnation comes from the very large gulf that initially exists between Men and God; and the extreme difficulty, thus slowness, of our learning all the many things we need to learn to ascend this ladder.

For Arkle, this process of learning is something that happens best when we are incarnated, that is when we have bodies rather than being spirits. The reason seems to be that the incarnated life, in the solid and resistant environment of earth, best provides the resistance we need to push against in order to develop.

It seems that Arkle also very likely had a direct apprehension of his own multiple reincarnations, although he does not mention this in his writings. At any rate, reincarnation is a significant element in his scheme; which he explains by the analogy of multiple ‘universes’ or ‘universities’, in ascending layers, in each of which the reincarnated spirit may learn different types of lessons.

But why does God want us to do go through all this prolonged process?

God wants colleagues and friends; not servants or worshippers 

Traditional religions have usually asserted that God wants humans to be his obedient servants and glorifying worshippers. Arkle, by contrast, regards such attitudes to God an man-made, somewhat immature, and (unintentionally) wounding to God.

He asks us to consider that an ideal and loving human parent does not want his grown-up children to adopt a servile and worshipping attitude to his parents; no more does God – although as younger children obedience is necessary and some level of hero-worshipping almost inevitable. Arkle then makes the point that neither human beings, nor this world we live in, seem to be designed to encourage servile obedience and worship – indeed, there would not be much point to having mortal embodied life if these were the ideals; since it would surely be better for us to remain in Heaven, as angelic spirits, surrounded-by and immersed-in the love of God; taking it all for granted; and with no reason to disobey or assert ourselves.

However, since instead this world is actually full of temptations, challenges and suffering; and since we ourselves are so varied and prone to mistakes and sins; and since we already know that this world was made for us by a loving God; by a kind of ‘reverse engineering’ (of inferring purpose from design) all this implies that temptations, challenges, suffering, variety, error and (even) sin are ‘part of the plan’ for our own learning and development towards that ultimate aim of becoming God’s divine friends.

In other words, if God had merely wanted Men to be obedient ‘puppets’, this could have been easily achieved by designing all men to be identical, making us perfectly obedient and consistent by nature, and putting us into an environment that ensured we would always do what was asked of us. The fact that we are – in contrast – unique individuals, intermittently rebellious, inconsistent, and live in a world of temptations and suffering means that God must want us to experience, learn and develop; by a messy ‘trial and error’ process.

But the ‘mess’ and the ‘errors’ are in fact part of God’s plan! If God wanted servants and worshippers, he could make a tidy world that would stamp-out great populations of clones – either all identical, or perhaps a few groupings of types (e.g. the ‘Medieval’ classes of warriors, priests, craftsmen and peasants; or the Hindu castes).

But friends are each unique – each friend is a one-off, and valued as such. We know this from our own aspirations. We want a friend to be an independent person, who can surprise us. We want each friend to be himself or herself – and the more themselves they become, the better. Each (deep, lasting) friendship is therefore being continually energised, developed, self-renewed by interaction in dyads and small groups.

Therefore, to understand the nature of this world, we need to recognise that it is ultimately a world of unique individuals, who are intended to become even more individual as they move to higher levels of evolution. The great hope is that such individuals will choose to become allied by love, will choose to become real, deep, divine friends; and harmonised by this love (as an ideal family is harmonised by love in its aims and activities) will work together in the work of creation.

Our attitude to God

From this, Arkle argues for a very different attitude to God from that of traditional religion.

In particular, we ought not to behave as if God were malicious; for example by assuming that God requires propitiation and sacrifices to satisfy his demand for submission; or by assuming that we must engage in rituals of obedience and worship to prevent God becoming angry at our presumption.

Instead, Arkle would like us always to bear in mind that God is our loving parents, who want the best for us - both as a whole (all the children of God), as well as each and individually; and who are working ‘behind the scenes’ to help us learn and grow spiritually. But for this to happen, we must acknowledge that this world is indeed a place of learning; which is to say that this is a meaningful world – a world made of communications telling us things we need to know.

This world, and indeed our-selves, are not meant to be ‘perfect’ – because perfectly-designed people in a perfectly-designed world – who were perfectly happy; could not learn and develop. People start-out and would end-up all the same, and stuck in the state of happy but un-free puppets.  

God’s task was the difficult one of making a world in which there could be learning and development; and our task is the difficult one of learning and growing, step by step, towards spiritual adulthood. As we may recall from adolescence; such development is intrinsically difficult, indeed painful; and is not a smooth, uninterrupted upward ascent but more of a zig-zag – indeed somewhat like a game of snakes and ladders. But Arkle repeatedly reminds us that it is vital to recognise that the hardships of life we personally suffer are never from God’s malice, but always from God’s love (if we could but understand the Big Picture behind our own specific situation); working towards our attaining the highest possible level of deity. There is no ‘easy way’ to do this – just as there is no easy way to get through adolescence, learn mathematics, or how to play a musical instrument. 

Ultimately, all real learning is active; it is a self-learning; and Arkle says that God will always try to let us work our lessons for ourselves – only intervening when our situation is hopeless or we become ‘stuck’ – and as soon as possible handing responsibility back to us. If we are to become fully-developed individuals, this is how things must be.    

Our attitude to God, Arkle says, is therefore to approach God as (ideally) a growing child regards his loving parents, having absolute trust that our parents always want the best for us, and know far more than we do. The parents have a long term view, with the aim of nurturing grown-up, independent, and loving children.

Such parents (whether human or divine) do not seek to maximise the immediate pleasure of their children, nor to alleviate all instances of hardship, pain and misery; nor to give their children whatever they want or ask-for, here-and-now - the ideal parents main loving-concern is that we learn and grow; and to give their children what they need, taking into account the long-term. Therefore children are (by stages) given the greatest possible freedom, including freedom to make mistakes and do wrongs, and take the consequences of attitudes and actions; in hope that they will become responsible agents; will learn from their mistakes and the bad outcomes of wrong-thinking and wrong-doing. 

For similar reasons, a life of development cannot be a life of continual pleasure or bliss; since this would stultify learning. The ideal life of learning is varied, and contains a mixture of novelty (new challenges) and cycles of repeated challenges that we have not yet learned-from. And such is, indeed, the nature of our actual lives, as we observe them.

A world of communications

Arkle regards the whole world as meaningful, therefore potentially telling us important things. He rejects such concepts as randomness or luck; and instead sees all of life as a conversation between ‘beings’ who are in relationships.

Behind this lies his core belief that nothing is absolutely ‘dead’, everything is a being (or part of a Being) that is alive and conscious – but with widely varying degrees of life and consciousness.

So that humans and dogs are more conscious than trees, and trees more conscious than mountains – but everything shares in a vast web of inter-relationships and communications. This means that, in reality, we are never alone; nor do we ever lack the potential to understand and learn-from our situation.

However, most people, for most of the time (and, apparently, some people for all of the time) have decided that everything except humans are unconscious and most are not-alive. That is, we assume that we are ‘alone’ in a materialist universe instead of a creation, and a world mostly of ‘things’ rather than beings. We assume that – ultimately – things ‘just happen’, life means nothing and is going nowhere.

In A Geography of Consciousness, Arkle shows us that these are no more than assumptions – and mostly they are unconsciously adopted. If, instead, we become conscious about the fact that these are assumptions, we can examine them and may decide to reject them in favour of an understanding of a living, conscious reality – and, what is more, a living conscious reality made ‘for us’ such that we can potentially know and learn-from it.

So, for Arkle we are never alone, never cut-off from meaning, purpose or love. He urges that we recognise that we are immersed in a ‘sea’ of communications; of information and guidance; and that behind everything is our Heavenly Parents who are doing their best to enable us to learn what we most need. They are not trying to make our lives always easy and pleasant; but instead worthwhile and educative.

When we suffer – as so often happens – this is because (in an ultimate and long-term sense) sometimes suffering is the only thing we will respond to. For instance the alcoholic who sometimes must reach rock-bottom, and acknowledge that fact, before he can overcome his addiction. We might suppose ‘in theory’ that we should be able to learn important lessons without need for suffering – but experience suggests otherwise. For that specific individual, the addiction experience, and overcoming it, may contain vital lessons he personally needed to learn, but which he would not learn by any easier or more pleasant way. And that individual might learn the truth of this directly from God, and learn what God intended by it – but we, as detached outsiders, cannot know more than there was some important reason of some sort relating to someone.

But why are such insights not more common, and what stands in our way when we try to live in accordance with them?

The problem of false selves

If our true self is divine in origin (developed from a fragment of the living God) then one major theme of A Geography of Consciousness is to explain the various other more superficial and less fundamental selves that tend to dominate our lives; sometimes to the point of almost completely imprisoning and neutralising the true self.

Arkle terms these selves ‘entities’ and explains that they often serve useful purposes – for example in performing vital and useful functions automatically – so (once the function has been learned) we do not need to think about walking, catching a ball, or driving a car. There are many such processes, with varying degrees of dominance – and many will clash, and point in opposite directions; so that people are very inconsistent and self-contradicting in their behaviour, according to the functioning of one, then another ‘self’.

Therefore, to a variable extent, all humans are something like automata; but if we wish to become more divine then we need to become free; and that entails reaching a higher, coherent, integrative form of consciousness in which we are aware of what we do, and consciously choose to do it.

So, a basic problem is that most people, most of the time, do not know their true selves, and are not living from their true selves; but are instead (more or less unconsciously) simply doing and thinking whatever the process of these superficial selves are churning-out. It is this which makes it counter-productive always to ‘do what comes naturally’ – since what seems ‘natural’ to us in this modern world is very often artificial, inculcated by propaganda or malicious intent, evil, terrorising, despair-inducing…

For Arkle, to be free is to be conscious. We start by knowing (both from our divine self within, and by divine guidance from without) what is the right thing to do, in the exactly specific situation that is developing; taking into sufficient account all the other relevant beings and the purposes of creation; and continue by choosing to do that – when we could choose otherwise.

The problem of suffering and evil – The problem of ‘free will

The importance of Arkle for a modern reader is that he provides answers to the two major and linked problems for Modern Man when confronted by traditional Christianity: these are the existence of pain, suffering and evil in the world, and the existence and importance of ‘free will. Traditional Christianity has, of course, provided solutions to these problems since very early in its history (for example Boethius, who died in 524; in his famous The Consolations of Philosophy). But it is fair to say that most people who know them do not find these explanations satisfactory.

Traditional Christianity insists that God is omnipotent (all-powerful) and omniscient (all-knowing); and creation is essentially a thing ‘finished’ and already-existing out of Time. This model of reality seems to leave no space to fit-in genuine free will of Men, leaves no significant role for men in the work of creation; and seems to make God directly responsible for everything that happens, including the worst evils.

The traditional theological answers to such questions entail a view of God existing outside of Time, that undermines the significance of our mortal lives; and indeed seems to render Jesus irrelevant - an omnipotent God seems to have no need for the incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus to accomplish his designs; and no need for such varied Men to live such variable lives on earth. It would seem to make more sense to create Men directly into the timeless static perfection of Heaven – and leave-out mortal life and earth altogether…  

Arkle’s explanation is completely different; since it regards God as limited in power, still creating through time by an ongoing, open-ended, never-ending evolutionary process. Men and women are being already free, but need to become more-free by attaining higher consciousness. We need to decide our own fate, as much as possible; and learn from these decisions. The assumption is that at every stage, men have chosen to do what they do: we are incarnated by choice, because we want to learn to become more divine. But as already stated; learning is not easy, and often requires extreme situations. In order to learn, therefore, this world must be real to us, and the problems (pains, sufferings, etc.) must also be real.

God’s hope is that some Men will, from love, make the necessary choices, and learn the necessary lessons, to enable them eventually to become friends and companions of God. Since each such exalted and deified Man would be unique, he or she would be able to bring genuinely-new perspectives to the work of creation, and to make creation something it otherwise could not have been.

Pain, suffering, failure, evil… all these are aspects of reality that the developing man or woman needs to know – and to know from personal experience – if he or she is to become able to participate in the work of creation. These are aspects of reality, and always will be to some extent; because not everybody (not all men and angels) will choose to favour and participate-in the work of creating; some will (from their genuine freedom) oppose and try to destroy the ongoing creation.

So anti-creative forces are real, inevitable, and we need to learn to recognise and overcome them – recognise and overcome them in our-selves and in others. It is not enough to know about; we must know from experience. It is not enough to know only the positives (love, hope, faith…), we need also to know, experience, overcome the negatives (fear, despair, resentment…).

In a nutshell; for Arkle, God is wholly Good and wholly Loving, but limited in power, and the work of creation is continuous and never complete. We are ultimately divine in our innermost selves, but we also have multiple other conflicting selves – including false selves subject to temptation, errors, evils etc. Our task is to navigate and learn-from this difficult but highly ‘educational’ environment, which is designed to teach each of us (from experience) those specific lessons he or she most needs to learn.

There is no genuine ‘problem’ of pain – my suffering is in some way a part of God’s loving long-term plan for me and God’s other children, to which I personally agreed before incarnation. This understanding of ‘my’ suffering is open to anybody and everybody, by means of direct knowledge from God; assuming we ask the question with the proper assumptions, and if we will accept the answer given. We can each know the meaning of our own suffering.

What we cannot know, is the meaning of every individual person’s suffering, or the suffering of groups or classes of people – elsewhere in the world or in history. Indeed, even to ask such a question is an error. Why? In the ideal family that we can imagine, it would be possible for each child to know why his own loving parents had made such and such a decision entailing suffering; but if that child demanded to know why such-and-such suffering happened to some remote fifth cousins whom he had never met, knew very little about, and cared even less – then we can see that such an understanding of the reason for specific suffering would be extremely unlikely – especially if the question was phrased such as to expect a short answer!  Even less likely could there be an answer when the question ‘why this suffering?’ is asked about some remote and vague ancestors, or some hardly-related person in some remote part of the world.

Yet this is exactly what so many modern people demand! They ask something about some suffering happing to someone somewhere; and they demand a short, snappy, wholly satisfying response to be fired-back at them! For example they ask why some hundreds/ thousands/ millions of people were subject to genocide; or why some specified remote person (read-about in the mass media or a history book) had to suffer in the way they (reportedly) did…

Indeed, typically this is not an honest question; because the person asking has already decided that there is not, and cannot be, any ‘good reason’ for suffering – because they already have assumed that everything that happens is random or mechanically determined, and therefore has no ‘reason’.

Arkle is an antidote to such false expectations. He gives pain and suffering their full place in life, but does not despair in the face of it because he knows why, and he knows that behind the Everything of all-creation, there are our loving Heavenly Parents. Arkle does not despair because he does not expect mortal life to be easy; because it is meant to be about learning, which is difficult. And he refuses to be distracted by vague demands and generalisations, in a situation when each person and situation is unique - and in which the intention is that we should each become more unique.

The graphs and geometrical diagrams… the physics metaphors

As I have already emphasised: A Geography of Consciousness is not an easy book. One of the strangest and most difficult aspects is that Arkle presents his ideas via a series of elaborate metaphors that are illustrated by graphs and geometry diagrams. This is a considerable obstacle, a stumbling block, for readers who have come to the book because of interest in the spiritual content.

These mathematical and scientific analogies presumably arise from Arkle having been trained as an engineer in the Royal Navy and continuing this scientific interest in later life. This was an unusual background for a spiritual philosopher and painter – although Rudolf Steiner shared a similar root in science, and also used geometrical diagrams to illustrate his lectures.

Surveying his writings, it seems to me that Arkle quite naturally thought using abstract models and comparisons – he apparently found this an effective way of clarifying his established understanding, and creatively pushing it into new understandings.

In other words, Arkle’s mathematical and scientific abilities were a source of strength, and a basis for his major insights, as well as making life more difficult for his readers! What Arkle is doing in A Geography of Consciousness is to show the arguments, the trains of thought, leading up to his spiritual conclusions. That is, Arkle is ‘showing his workings’; rather than simply stating conclusions (as he does in some others of his writings).

I think this reflects the two ways Arkle worked: he reasoned like a scientist from premises and assumptions that he had reached by direct intuitive apprehension; and he also sought direct intuitive confirmation of the products of his logical reasoning. When these two methods agreed, he could be more confident in the truth he had reached.

My advice to those who are put-off by the graphs and diagrams is just to continue reading as best they can, skimming to get the ‘gist’ of the points, as required. It is often easier to come back to the graphs after you understand where they are leading; the pictures can then help to make the key points more memorable.

Furthermore it is important to remember that Arkle’s key metaphor is much simpler and more accessible than science or geometry; it is The Family. Arkle repeatedly points-out that The Family is a microcosm of the whole of creation. That is, the ideal family is a group of beings in a loving and creative, open-ended relationship; and so is The Universe.

Almost everyone has an innate understanding of The Family – what it could be, and what it should ideally be – and this can serve as a Master Key to unlock a true understanding of God’s creation and our place in it.

Levels of consciousness – how to live life

Colin Wilson’s introduction from the first edition describes and discusses Arkle’s interest in higher levels of consciousness; so I will be focus mainly on the bottom level of consciousness: the physical or material level, the level of ‘matter’.

Arkle regards it as a huge and harmful error that modern Man has come to regard ‘matter’ as the only real reality. Only that is real which can be perceived, detected, measured… everything else (including, ultimately, truth, beauty, virtue; the spiritual and the divine) is imaginary, an illusion, an epiphenomenon of material processes. This is sometimes termed positivism, materialism, reductionism or scientism – but it is the normal, mainstream, public and official world view in the developed world (and has been for several generations). It is also how almost everybody now regards their lives and the world.

We (nowadays) therefore live in a world that is both privately and ‘officially’ made from dead matter. From our-selves; we look-out upon dead matter that is passively acted-upon by other dead matter, in processes of passive causality or random occurrence. A world of dead matter is a world without real meaning, a world going nowhere in particular; a world in which the small and brief human self feels overwhelmed and crushed by the vast mass of meaninglessness and death that is the cosmos…

No wonder that so many people are so bored; and perpetually seek to forget their situation by plugging into stimulation or obliterating consciousness with intoxication. If whirling matter is the only reality; since we have only ultimate disease, degeneration and death to look-forward to; not-thinking and unconsciousness seem the only rational response.

Yet, if Arkle is correct – if we take his perspective to be true, we are actually dwelling in a meaning-saturated universe, a creation; whose existence and purpose encompasses our own unique selves, in the context of all other persons and beings! Our task, then, is first to recognise this reality. We need to reject the ‘model’ of a futile, material ‘reality’, utterly indifferent to our selves and our concerns. And instead need to realise that we actually dwell inside a vast and complex multitude of communications; surrounded by messages that we could be reading and learning from – instead of denying and ignoring.

Arkle’s second hope is that we may allow such a recognition to permeate our lives; overcoming the false selves that smother us and the false ideas that impinge upon us. Then we shall experience this living, conscious, communicating reality – at first seldom and weakly, later more often and with greater strength.

It is vital to recognise that for all his aspiring idealism, his infectious hope; Arkle is a tough, hard-nosed thinker! He promises a life that will include struggle, hardship and adventure; not a life of continuous bliss or ecstasy (which would be useless for learning). Since we are here by choice, here to learn, and learning is work; we must expect that we shall experience whatever most helps our own learning. Experience whatever we need in order to learn – and we may be one of those people who resist learning what we most need. And if so, extreme situations may be required.

Furthermore, Arkle envisages a very ‘human’ life – including all the usual errors, weakness, inconsistency, wickedness and other genuine flaws to which we are all inevitably prone – since we are only very-partially-developed divine beings, with a long way still to go, much to learn. When properly understood, and properly responded to, all such lapses from our ideal behaviour will become learning experiences, and sources of exactly that spiritual development which is our purpose here on earth and in these mortal lives.

So, even the toughest and most miserable life can, if we do indeed learn its lessons, yield cosmically significant - eternally significant - fruits for our-selves. 

And this is the basis of Arkle’s most obvious and distinctive attribute: his optimism. He is tremendously positive about life; and he actually lived in accordance with his ideas optimism and positivity to a much greater extent than most people achieve – as Colin Wilson describes, and has been confirmed by my own enquiries.

Arkle’s optimism shines-through his writings; and also his paintings, poems, music and his other creative works. From this book we can discover that this was a tough optimism based-upon reality; an optimism which we can potentially share ourselves. That is why A Geography of Consciousness is such a very important book.

There is nothing wrong with being an ego!

Edited from The Resolution of Grief, an essay published in The Great Gift (1977) by William Arkle:


Behind the ordinary ego, or within the ordinary ego, is the divine ego. So there's nothing wrong with being egotistic - in the proper sense of the word.

There is something wrong with being egotistic in a narrow sense of egotism, in which everything is built up around the importance of its own self centre. But as this egotism grows, as it should do in a healthy being, it naturally grows into its bigger self, and the bigger self naturally grows into the little self, and the two integrate.

This is what psychologists describe as integration. It is the integration of the true self with the personality self of the physical body situation, and the two learn to live together and integrate completely. Then the personality becomes a wonderful instrument through which the divine self can experience, and learn, and interpret its learning, and communicate with other beings through physical forms, and through physical means of expression.

In doing that, it learns a great deal, and helps others to learn a great deal, and it builds and builds and learns to express the divine potentialities that we've been talking about - the divine friendships and the endless possibilities which emanate from its true nature.


So there is nothing wrong with being an ego, which is another word for 'I' and 'Iness'. You never lose the sense of 'Iness'.

You might lose the sense of knowing who your 'I' is, who you are, because the narrow sense of the personality ego - the smaller ego - often gets a very complete but restricted image of who it is, and it spends the rest of its life conforming to that image of who it is.

But the divine ego, the spiritual ego, the true self, is able to be itself and, at the same time, know that it is in a state of becoming. It isn't very concerned to circumscribe itself, to give itself a definite image, because it knows that if it does, that it's going to limit its ability to respond in an ever new way to new possibilities.


So what happens in life, is that we gradually learn to integrate the smaller sense of ego with the deeper and greater sense of ego; and, without losing a sense of 'I', the 'I' begins to become equally concerned with the well-being of others as it is with its own well-being; equally concerned with the happiness and the beauty and the possibility of the others in creation, its brothers and sisters, as it is concerned with its own reality.

So what happens, in a successful life, is that the ego broadens-out and gets bigger in a proper loving, caring way; not bigger in a grasping way, which is centred on its own small and selfishly oriented appetites; more a growing, which is able to grasp the meaningfulness, and the value to itself, of the fulfilment of all other forms of life, and all other beings, and all its other brothers and sisters.

Then the ego just grows and grows to include the well-being of all other egos. But there's nothing wrong in the sense of ego awareness.


What we call 'egotism', on the whole, reflects an unhealthy attitude in which everything is drawn into the small-self for a small-self satisfaction, small-self fulfilment of the wrong order, not large-self fulfilment for the higher order. The small-self fulfilment is a lower order appetite such as appearing to be important in the eyes of other people, appearing to be clever, appearing to be valuable in some way which is superior to other people, trying to be 'one up' on other people and so forth.


Note added (by Charlton): Arkle here is an antidote to the prevalent error that Christianity is aimed-at the loss of self; rather than the true Christian aim of expansion of self. Another error is that the ego-less human may then achieve a union with God that is an assimilation; rather than the true aim of a loving relationship between God (the creator) and his divinised children - the Sons and Daughters of God.

Becoming more divine: Conscious, detached, distanced learning from experience

A new and core aspect of modernity is that we are required to become aware of that which it was (in earlier cultural phases) sufficient to be and do unconsciously.

We don't just need to learn implicitly (and to do what is right), but also to know explicitly what we learn (to be aware of what is right).

But why? One short answer is that we need this to grow towards divinity, because gods are explicitly aware of what they know; and need to be aware in order to create harmoniously.

A longer answer is that knowledge needs to become objective as well as subjective. Objectivity implies that knowledge is universal (the same for all who know, or at least there being the same ultimate basis for everyone's knowing - despite differences in capacity and personal biases).

And objectivity also implies that there is a detachment.

Detachment means (here) being outside a specific experience, such that we become clear about what is universal. Clarity is another name for consciousness, because with clarity the universal emerges from the particular - we apprehend that which we need to learn.

Because this is learning; for experience to become useful for the future, learning must extract the universal from multitude of unique, specific situations. This can be done without awareness, as happens in simple animals, and also in plants.

But we need clarity about what is universal to move towards divinity. It is no longer sufficient just to learn, we must also know consciously what we have-learned.

It is more-developed consciousness to know with clarity what we have learned, even when a person has learned less than (is a worse person than) one who knows only implicitly.

By close analogy, a child may be - usually is - more Good than an adult; nonetheless our task is to grow up (that is to develop not necessarily to fully-divine spiritual adulthood; but progress to that level destined by our eternal nature).


Note: The above is my re-expression of ideas from William Arkle.

Passive/ static/ abstract love versus active/ dynamic/ personal love

Edited from the essay Divine Love in The Great Gift by William Arkle (1977)

We can realise for ourselves that love can be passive or active. We can know for ourselves that it is possible to sit down and simply radiate love, like a light bulb radiates light, in all directions but not directed in any particular way to any particular thing. This is passive love. 

We can feel that love becomes a more active if we begin to direct it onto an object, say a stone; but we can feel a difference if we direct this loving attention onto something more fully alive, such as a plant or a flower. 

This time we recognise a relationship which has a wider range of responses in it, and it is easier and more satisfying to love such a responsive thing. But now, if we look at how we feel if we direct our loving attention to even more living objects such as pet animals, human beings and children we realise that our love and relationship can grow again and become even more valuable. 

And if these human beings are of a more deeply beautiful and gracious order, then the activity of our love leaps into higher and higher expressions which are more valuable and delightful. Finally from the experience of our love directed actively to a most valuable human being, we can move again to a situation in which we are able to love a perfectly beautiful and gracious person, and this is our God of love. 

Because our God is the most alive and responsive being, this experience of actively directed love can be the most sublime. 

In this highest form of active love we must therefore have the one who loves and the one who is loved in order to arrive at a responsive situation. So we have two individuals, our God of love and the one who loves God. In this situations, the one who loves God enters into a Divine relationship in which both individuals are of the same order, even if God is far more mature than the individual who is loving him. 

So, at the moment that the individual really loves God as another individual who can be loved, then the two of them become friends in the Divine nature to which they both belong. 

This means that God no longer has to be God, but can become a friend to the one who loves Him and can love his friend back again in the way that love must if it is to express the fulfilment of its nature. 

The one who loves God also gradually realises that he is loving a real responsive individual with whom he is now a friend, and this experience is confirmed by all the other experiences of love to be different from worship. For worship is a sort of one-sided love which does not allow for a response and therefore cannot move into friendship, because in worship we do not relate to God as a living being but we idealise God in a fixed image that we have in our own understanding and thus we prevent Him coming alive. 

We do this, no doubt, out of a diminished sense of our own value and adequacy and out of a sense of modesty. But we only have to look at the nature of love for a moment to realise that the truest form of love does not have to behave in this manner. In fact it is unkind to worship others, rather than to love them, because it fixes them in a mould they do not wish to be fixed in; in fact by worshipping people we imprison them. 

But love does not wish to imprison the one it loves, above all, love longs to give expansion and enhanced beingness to the one it loves. Love longs to be in a creative and growing relationship with the one it loves. 

Love is the highest expression of life itself, and life is never static, but always wishes to be aspiring and developing towards new and untried possibilities ties. 

So what I feel the term a loving God really means, is that this God is trying to develop us to a stage where we can become His friends in this deeply loving, active, personalised way which allows the creative fruits of a friendship to arise between them which constantly keeps pace with the liveliness and creative aspiration of the living spirit of our common Divine nature. 

Note from BGC

This passage from Arkle, and some others on a similar theme, worked on me over time to create a powerful recognition of validity; that we ought not to aim to worship God, but to become 'divine friends' with God; because this is what God most wants from us, and there is an answering desire from deep within us.

God ultimately does Not want to be 'worshipped' by his grown-up children, any more than any Good Man wants to be worshipped by his grown-up children. That is, worship is accepted as a normal and necessary phase of maturation; but it is not the eventual or permanent ideal. The hope is that it will give way to a relationship of complementary, each-different, and loving, friends - both of whom are united in loving God and participating (with God and each other) in the ongoing work of creation.


Another way this passage affected me, is that there is a personal and directed love which is higher and more active, more dynamic than the 'passive' love which radiates out in all directions. This distinguishes between the personal active love idealised by Christianity - which is as strong as our strongest and most personal love; and the passive, impersonal, static state of abstract love that is the ideal of 'Eastern' religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism.

Such love has more recently been adopted (in a materialistic and distorted form) by the modern advocates of Leftism. In terms of the 'universalist' ethic of equal altruism - mainstream modern Leftism supposes that we love everybody and everything equally regardless of response or outcome. This kind of 'universal' love is passive and cut-off; implies a static state of being - rather than an active and developing relationship; and is as weak as our weakest affection.

The secular 'Right' (which is actually just a subset of the Left) may modify and restrict the universalism of love to some category as nation, race, party - but are also abstract and passive in terms of the nature of this love.

Religions other than Christianity (and Christians who have missed the point) fail to recognise the primacy of love in God's nature; and develop theologies that may include love but - again - love of the universal, abstract, static and passive type. 


For Christians, only love that is personal and active/dynamic will suffice; and this love is spread only as far and as fast as networks of personal love may link us; that is, person by person within families (including especially our divine family) and among real (divine) friends.

The purpose of creation is everlasting creating

Edited from The Resolution of Grief, an essay published in The Great Gift (1977) by William Arkle:

From what I understand, the motivation for the whole of creation is that out of it should come a number of individuals who have chosen their own unique path to individuality and therefore become true unique individuals.

The Creator longed for many of these true individuals to choose to realise 'Himself' and 'Herself' as a father and mother and as a friend; should choose to relate to this Creator as a friend, not so much as a God, but more as a friend.

The more we grow in our understanding of our own reality and 'the gift', and the attitude behind the gift, from the Creator's position, the more we shall become able to take up this position of divine friendship with our Creator as well as with one another.

We shall be able to take up this position of divine friendship because, in our desire to read the heart of the Creator, we shall become more and more certain that it is the deepest thing that the Creator longs for. 

And with any friend this is the only motive we have - it is to read the deepest level of their Being and help to fulfil for them the deepest longings in their Being. This is what friends long to do for one another. It is a very creative activity, and out of it comes an endless series of creative attitudes and creative activities.


Notes from BGC:

This is apparently a very different understanding of God's motivation than most religious people have held throughout history. This is the insight that God wants that there be more gods with whom he can can live in loving and creative 'friendship'.

(Although friendship as commonly used is too weak a word - a model for this friendship is an ideal and eternal version of the love between grown-up children and their parents; this extended family working together - and with other families - on all the tasks and joys of living.)

This is a personal motivation of God; and God is therefore envisaged as a person - indeed as two  persons: the primal Father and Mother.

This entails that at the very bottom of reality, at the most fundamental level; reality consists of Beings; and the most important thing about the Beings is their relationships - specifically their love. And the most important thing that these loving Beings do is creating.

So 'the creation' is actually an 'ing' not an 'ion' - creation wasn't done, it is doing; and the hope of God is that we will choose to become - like our Heavenly parents - engaged in that doing.

This raises the point of 'true individuals', and that they cannot be 'made' but at most 'encouraged' and 'educated'. This world is made as a place where people can each have the experiences they most need to learn from (if they so choose), to learn and grow towards fuller godhood.

The need of creation is for individuals who are capable of love and have chosen love; and who are also capable of true creation - which is (to be valuable) something to which each individual brings something unique...

We create from our uniqueness. Being an individual is an essential part of the plan; in other words, God has as many plans as individuals - and each plan is a collaboration.

Therefore, the nature of this world is such as to encourage each of us to develop that creative uniqueness - within a context of love.
 

William Arkle and the secret of living Romantically

I first encountered William Arkle in 1977, in the context of a thirty minute documentary on his life and work broadcast by our local BBC television company. I can remember very little about it; but it evoked in me a suspicion or hope that Arkle was someone who actually lived the kind of life I regarded as ideal.

When I found a copy of A Geography of Consciousness later in the year, this was confirmed for me by Colin Wilson's introduction - clearly CW (who knew Arkle as a friend) was fascinated by Arkle's 'success' in actually living his life in a 'higher state of consciousness'. Arkle (to a significant, albeit not fully or perfectly) succeeded in Doing what Wilson could only write about.

This I take as the fact on which I proceed, my starting-point. For Me, over a span of more than forty years, William Arkle has been a very rare example of living life in the kind of way (qualitatively distinct, but not as flawless or perfection) that I believe life ought to be lived, and which I aspire to live. My interest here is my failure honestly to understand the basis of Arkle's success.
  Because, in trying to learn from Arkle, however; it seems that both myself and Colin Wilson made the same mistake - which was, quite simply, leaving-out God.


For Arkle - at the centre of his 'system' was God, God the creator, and furthermore a creator who was our loving Father. Arkle's 'Romantic' system was built around this core; yet I wanted Arkle's success in living but without Arkle' God.

I (like Colin Wilson) implicitly regarded Arkle's God as just wishful thinking; as a God he had invented to aperfom a function he wanted performed in his belief system. Having disposed of Arkle's God, which - being unreal - could clearly have no necessary role in Arkle's life; I then proceeded to try and learn fro the rest of Arkle's system.

In effect, I was hoping to get the benefits of living in the successful way that I regarded Arkle as having achieved; while eliminating the source and core of Arkle's system - which was God (I ruled-out God in general, except for 'deity' conceptualised in the most abstract and impersonal way; as well as regarding as rather silly and pitiful God in the particular 'loving Father' understanding of Arkle).


In a nutshell, I wanted Romanticism without God; and it led me in the same direction as those many others who have sought Romanticism without God from the days of Byron and Shelley to contemporary examples of Romantics such as Woody Allen or Francois Truffaut. Or, in a much more positive way, Colin Wilson himself.

For 200 years our culture has been full of examples of people who (apparently sincerely) espouse the Romantic life, but are unable to live it; people who can research and talk about Romantic themes; but who live (in their consciousness, in their souls) much like everybody else and often-enough live worse.

So myself, Colin Wilson and many others wanted Romanticism, but did not believe that God was real - and we did not achieve Romanticism in actual living. Meanwhile there were examples such as Arkle or William Blake of people who did achieve Romanticism in actual living; 'yet' apparently insisted on basing it upon Romantic conceptions of God that struck me as obviously 'made-up'.


My understanding of this phenomenon is that those who seek Romanticism are those afflicted by alienation; by the modern sense of feeling cut off from life, and who are plagued by a sense of meaninglessness, lack of a purpose that fulfils our creativity and also unites ourselves with other and the world.

Like many/ most modern people from adolescence onwards; we begin with the assumption that there is no God, never was a God; and that all talk of personal Gods who care about us is either delusionally-pitiful wishful thinking; or else a dishonest means of manipulating others.

And we do not 'notice' that (by eliminating all possibility of the reality of God, and in particular the kind of God that Arkle speaks-of) we have already made assumptions that inevitably will ensure that our lives will fail.


It was not until I first allowed the possibility of God, then the possibility of Arkle's concept of God; that I could proceed to seek whether or not this was in reality true. Then I discovered that it was true.

Only now can I really understand Arkle 'from the inside', in a way which explains the primary cause of my long-term interest in him. Only now can I benefit from his example; in changing my own life for the better.

It turns-out that successfully-lived Romanticism requires God; furthermore it requires the kind of personal God that Arkle knew; and it turns-out that this God is real.

It turns-out that in practice Romantic Christianity is the only Romanticism. Arkle has been telling me this for decades - but only recently have I been willing to hear him.

The problem of false selves

One of William Arkle's core insights is that - in normal, everyday life - people act from a multitude of false selves. The true self, which is of divine origin and potentially able to become a god, is what makes us what we are - but it may be completely buried beneath false selves; the true self may be utterly ineffectual.

These false selves are of many types. Some are the collections of traits - hereditary and socialised - that constitute our 'personality' as described and measured by psychology. Others are that mass of automatic, robotic skills and responses that we learn to deal with the problems of living; including skills like typing or driving, small-talk and routine social interaction.

You can see that false selves are the totality of what a person presents to the world; and usually also everything that a person is aware of in himself, insofar as he is aware of anything. So, our consciousness is not the same thing as our true self, because it may be unaware of the true self, may even deny the reality of any such thing as a true self.

False selves are therefore necessary but a problem, because whenever we make an effort to change ourselves in any way, the probability is that this will be a matter of one or more of the false selves trying to change us in a superficial and false direction.

This is why methods of meditation,. methods of self-improvement, will-power... all such endeavours are nearly always ineffective. It is just a matter of distorting ourselves by exaggerating one or more false selves.

And how can we consciously strive to discover and nurture our true self, when the striving is being done by a false self?

Or if we try to relax and let-go the true self; simply 'allowing' the true self to emerge from under the false ones; there is a likelihood that we will instead be releasing one or more of the false selves...

The problem is not insoluble, because it has been achieved by others (and perhaps even by our-selves, albeit infrequently and briefly); but Arkle makes clear that there is no method to it; and indeed part of solving the problem is to recognise why there is no method. We must 'quarry out' our real self from the false ones, by some kind of trial and error - discovering what works for us, here and now; but never able to make the process a standard one.

The answer can be summarised as 'intuition' - but that is just giving a name to the fact that there is no method. But the start of a solution is to define the problem - and after that to recognise when the true self is emerging and strengthening. And this can be done by learning to recognise the uniquely self-validating quality of the true self.

Once you know it is there, real and vital - we can feel the reality of the true self in an absolutely distinctive way - even though we cannot describe it.