What is being communicated in William Arkle's paintings? Sunny optimism in the long-term

I recently posted four paintings done by William Arkle in (probably) the 1950s -

http://williamarkle.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/some-1950s-watercolours.html

These are strikingly simple, child-like and 'naïve' in style - apparently rather superficially and idealistically happy images in luminous colours... Many other, somewhat similar, examples can be found here:

http://www.billarkle.co.uk/greatgift/pictureseq/thumbs.html
http://shepton.org/page/the-paintings-of-william-arkle

So, what was Arkle getting-at by painting in this way?

First, we must acknowledge that what he did was deliberate - it was not because he couldn't paint in any other way. An engagement with his work, and knowledge of his biography, makes clear that he was an extremely tough thinker, and a practical man. He had the typical inner strength of a genius - and the confidence of a seer.

Plus - his vision of life was deep and profoundly true (in essence and outline).

So where is the horror and corruption of life? Why did he paint to exclude this - apparently as if he was a sunny optimist who was unaware of anything else?

The answer would seem to be that sunny optimism is the true-est and deepest attitude to life - to any life... in the long-term.

We ought to be simple optimists - but over a large timescale.

And we must not - as Arkle never did in his work - lose sight of the tiny and vital aspects of life. Arkle's paintings combine overall happy optimism in the long term - as often depicted by tranquil cosmic figures hovering over landscapes, or light emerging from things, places people - with little scenes of ordinary human life: people (sometimes tiny people) standing and sitting, holding hands, at work, walking, playing, on holiday, boating, eating and drinking...

Why no horror, pain, corruption? Because in the end is does not matter very much to those who choose to become divine friends of our Heavenly Parents. Sooner or later - but probably later - it is not negated but swallowed-up and put into perspective in the fulfilment and creativity of love. Suffering is subordinated to delight - this is what the pictures show.

What about 'other people'? The universe is set-up such that they are given what they want. But how if they want not to be with us? Well, would we prefer that they were forced?

Yes, but how if those we love are fooled, duped, misled into self-damnation. This is indeed tragedy - but in a universe presided over by a wholly Good creator, we know that this tragedy is expressed mostly in term of delay - not exclusion.

Arkle's paintings tell us that the powers of evil are simply wrong. They are mistaken about teir own power. They have much less power than they suppose - and that mainly to delay, confuse etc. but not to damn.

Their triumphs are fragile - even their own evil self-will is in constant peril of repentance...

Some 1950s watercolours

I got these from William Arkle's son Nick's open Facebook pages - I post them here so the images may not be lost to posterity.

Will, Providence and Winston Churchill

This exposition is edited and adapted from William Arkle's A Geography of Consciousness pages 213-4:


We sometimes consider the human will to be something like a show of psychological strength and virility. And providence or fate, therefore, may seem to be a product of mastery by some individual's will. But the true will works in a manner that is almost completely contrary to this idea. 

The true will achieves its purpose in harmony with every other will. This happens by the true will working behind the scenes, along with all other wills, at a level far behind the surface of things. 

The true will recognizes the value of all things, and aims to be harmless towards every form of life, by working quietly and patiently, and eventually bringing-together and arranging all the correct factors in the correct place and at the correct time.

So, by the time we observe the will at work in some way which seems providential, this is merely the endpoint of a vast and complex and extremely subtle arrangement of factors which have been coming-together over a long period of time. 

So subtle; that the appearance is one of a staggering multiplicity of coincidences, or a providential event of extraordinary improbability.

When we notice that a strong and able individual (a 'great man') appears in political life at a very critical time, we may say that 'the time produces the man'. This may partly be true; but in reality the necessary individual may be present at the critical time because the crisis and that individual's being were inseparably connected by that individual's true will from a long time previously. That individual's true will was able to foresee the confrontation of the forces which created the crisis.  

In effect, the true will of the great man designed-itself to be present as an individual person, exactly in order to be able to take part in the crisis which required it.

Winston Churchill is a case which comes to mind. 

**

Twelve steps on the path to escape alienation and evolve towards higher consciousness

Derived from A Geography of Consciousness by William Arkle (1974) - Chapter Six "Problems" pages 108-114

1. The difficulties of improving and increasing our level of consciousness are so many and so great that we cannot achieve this alone.

2. Therefore help and guidance are necessary; and will always be made available.

3. But we must use our own initiative if evolution of consciousness is to occur - because the process depends upon building our true-self (our soul) through experience.

4. When we express the strong resolution and desire to understand and enter-into the deeper meanings of life - then some agency will put us into touch with a suitable group to assist the process.

(By agency is meant a supernatural personal purposive entity - such as an angelic being or the Holy Ghost.)

5. Making contact with a suitable group may be regarded as destiny, or just random luck - but that doesn't matter either way.

6. Then we come to see the beginnings of the next step.

7. We must take the next step ourselves from our innermost and most-fundamental being; because what we are building is our own directive ability.

8. When we have taken that step, help will be given as needed - this may appear as serendipity, personal miracles, lucky breaks...

9. As a rule, active external help is restricted to situations for which we are not fully responsible, where we cannot cope or understand, or are unprepared or incapable.

10. External help therefore reinforces the primary goal - reinforces our will - it does not take over from it.

11. When we are on the path towards self-knowledge and higher consciousness, we will never be truly alone nor without supervision.

But supervision may allow us to 'burn our fingers', if this is a lesson we need to learn and this is the only or best way of learning it. For example, pride often needs painful experiences to expose and tame it.

12. As progress is made, our true-self and our short-comings, errors, and lapses become more obvious to us. Our self-evaluations become more accurate. For instance, the personality - often, mistakenly, prized and developed - is shown to be merely a means to an end.

Understanding the creator's rationale for the plan of existence

The ideas of William Arkle are based upon his imaginative identification with, intuitive understanding of, and (I believe) direct mystical revelation concerning the purpose of God, the Creator in manifesting this world. All his work is an exploration of this theme,in its many ramifications.

I have edited the following from a little, self-published booklet called Equations of Being: notes on the nature of love - originating from Arkle's home in Backwell (the village in Somerset, England where I spent all my school years) - which seems to date from about 1980. 

I would advise copy, pasting and printing-out the excerpt below; if you want to get the most from it. 

**

By trying to put ourselves in the position of the Creator whose nature is love and spiritedness, we may be able to draw conclusions which help us to understand and accept the situation on Earth as we find it at the present time. 

We may come to realise that the difficulties of life, while often painful, are also extremely valuable if we can view them as a part of the process of making us into real and responsible individual spirits who can become companions of the endless life in which the Creative Source wishes us to meet Him.

I wish to suggest that we put ourselves in the position of this Creative Source, the God of what we love, and begin to see things from the position we would be in if we were about to make the plans for this scheme of manifestation of which our worlds are a part.

*

When we put ourselves in the position of this Creator, it is then that we have to look more closely at the nature of love, and try to understand the principles which it contains. Unless we can do this we cannot begin our designing, for we will not be clear about what we are trying to achieve.

We might, for instance, try to design a scheme which would be like a continuous, perfect, summer holiday situation. We would begin with the idea of ease and happiness in mind. We would find that our schemes did not contain responsibility or difficulty. 

I think we would find that our plans would take for granted that it was easy to include other people in our perfect world; but we would make up a perfect and easy world where everyone was like ourselves; and where all the things that really mattered to us were simply put into the picture, ready made.

All our schemes would contain other people, for none of us would want to be lonely, and all of us would sooner or later begin to realise that other people were an integral part of all that we enjoyed about ourselves.

But we would rapidly discover that a sort of mythical ‘deckchair on golden deserted sands’ situation was a trap. A little would be pleasant, but only because it is what we are most short of in our experience of life as it is on Earth. Even if we allowed ourselves a companion, or even a family, we would find that there was still a lot wrong. The family who sat about with us would soon get restless - as we would.

*

So we would want to explore a bit, go for a walk, see something new. We may go for a swim. Swimming and short walks, on a perfect beach in perfect weather, with all our loved ones about us; such might be a beginning...

But the walks would have to get longer and the swimming would have to include diving. The diving would lead to exploring the seabed and the walks would become voyages of discovery. We would wish to feel that family or friends were on the sands for us to come back to, but we would want to feel free to explore, we would want to feel free to experiment with different sorts of walking and swimming, different combinations of walking, swimming and sitting in the sun...

We would wish to talk to our companions, we would wish to enjoy their company. We would wish to laugh and have a bit of fun. And we would need for them to be real in their own right, so that the laughter and fun was real and full of surprise and the unexpected. 

(Because if we had programmed the other people to be just like ourselves, we would find it very difficult to keep up the pretence of enjoying their company, their fun and their affection. For pretence it would have to be, since we were merely entertaining ourself in other guises.)

*

If we looked into the matter further, we would discover, if we play with this problem, that whatever form we take and whatever environment we take it in there are certain basic requirements which stem from the nature of love itself. 

Our sense of loving to explore and experiment is as real as our love of basking in sunny happiness. And our sense of love needs other people to do these things with. We require fun and delight with other peoples company, and these other people need to be just as real as we are. 

So, a big problem is that any idea of existence requires us to people our world with beings who are different from ourselves, who most certainly must not have been programmed or brainwashed by us in any way. In fact we find that other people who are as real and independent as we are, is something we cannot do without.

So we face this situation that when we start the scheme off, we have to accept that other people might wish to do things that did not appeal to us. We would have to learn to accept one another’s different approaches and the fact that although we may have designed the scheme, we would have to give to others the same rights as we have. We would have to hand over the control and outcome to other people.

*

Against this argument is the realisation that a creative scheme has to ensure that the freedom which is allowed to the other individuals who live in it is handed to them gradually as their responsibility grows and is able to bear it safely. 

Because although we need to give to our friends, to who we wish to live-with in our designed creation, the freedom and independence which makes them real to us and therefore makes the experience of their company completely valid; we would not wish to reach a stage at which we ourselves were over-ruled by them.

So, when we begin to imagine ways of bringing our companions into our creative scheme in such a way that we can give to them their own reality, and give it to them in such a way that we do not dominate them, we realise what a subtle thing this process will have to be...

Such companions will eventually have to be given the same creative reality as ourself, the creator, but they will begin their lives in a condition of great potentiality - a potentiality which will be entirely unrealised by them.

So our scheme of creation will have to be largely educational to start with; before our friends will have grown-up enough to enter into its delightful creative purpose with their own unique individual ways of looking at things and doing things, and with the responsibility which will ensure that their desire is to enhance all things and not to destroy or diminish.

*

We will need to help our friends to come to themselves gradually, and take the gift of their own reality upon themselves deliberately, by their own choices.

We will have to discover ways of showing them why the good and the beautiful qualities are considered by us, the creator, to be good and beautiful. And the only way we can do this, is by giving them a taste of the opposite qualities in order that they can knowingly say to themselves: ‘I have experienced beautiful and good attitudes which seek to enhance all things; and I have experienced ugly and evil attitudes which seek to diminish and enslave all things, and I chose the good and the beautiful and will always resist the opposite’. 

This is our world. 

*

In conclusion, when each of us, now, is considering our situation in life, we need to consider whether we would prefer to be given a very full and thorough education, in which difficulties acted upon us to strengthen all our characteristics which we feel to be valuable - because this is the situation of our actual world.  

Or would we have preferred an easy form of education in which we could obtain a token reality for ourselves in circumstances which required little effort on our part?

Or, again, would we have preferred to have been created with all our individuality ready-made and programmed into us? In which case we would not need education, for we would simply respond with the conditioning already at work in our nature, effortless and automatic and not within our power to change. 

In the long run I think we realise that the difficult and thorough way - the way of our actual lives in this world - was what we most wanted; because, above all, we wish to be real.

We want to be valuably real, and we do not want to be artificially valuable. 

http://www.billarkle.co.uk/prose/equations/index.html

Working to develop our gifts and powers may do harm (when motivations are bad)

*
This is William Arkle writing in the persona of God, who is writing a letter to us to explain himself:

You are in a situation where your own private world which you live in will be what you make it. If you allow it to be dominated by the wishes of your physical nature, you will feel alien to it even if you are carried along by it. If you feel like a stranger to yourself it will make you unhappy, and you will doubt your own true identity, and you will lose faith in all the higher values in life.

 You may disguise the situation to the people around you but inside yourself you will feel lost and helpless and degraded.

My work is to increase your sense of reality to yourself, and make it feel of great value to you, without it spilling over into pride and selfishness. The balance between the over-subdued nature and the over-inflated nature is not easy to keep, and is a necessary balance to be achieved before other values can be built in.

The balance between the over-subdued nature and the over-inflated nature is not easy to keep, and is a necessary balance to be achieved before other values can be built in. The foundation lessons to be taught are thus integrity and responsibility, combined with affection and sympathy, but added to an ability to feel a balanced importance in the scheme of things. 

It is not an easy thing to believe you have great value and ability, and at the same time maintain a temperament which does not try to show off and impress people, and perhaps even dominate them. 

Every new gift I give you with trepidation because I know you are more likely to misuse it before you learn to handle it correctly, so, to me, a gift can appear like an ordeal and a temptation, and I am worried when I see some of you working to achieve special powers which may well be your downfall so far as the graceful balance of your temperament is concerned. 

On the other hand, I am glad when I see you developing gifts as a result of loving aspiration and wise discrimination, for such gifts I know will surely benefit you and all those associated with you.

http://www.billarkle.co.uk/prose/letterfromafather3.html

*

In our culture there is a tendency to assume that gifts and abilities ought to be developed - people should make the most of themselves -- in general, the idea is that power and capability (in persons or in our groups or nations) are 'a good thing'.

But from a divine perspective there is a big problem - and it is a problem that we can see with many geniuses - especially the most recent twentieth century geniuses.

*

Gifts are potential abilities to affect the world - Gifts are Power.

Is power a good thing? It depends on what you do with it: But we would agree that giving power to an evil person, or even just an irresponsible person, is a bad thing.

Bad, that is, from a divine perspective, even when the specific person with power got what they wanted. And bad from the perspective of that individual's 'graceful balance of temperament'.

(Think of Gollum and the Ring of Power - Gollum 'wanted' to possess the Ring, but it was bad for Gollum's balance of temperament, and bad from a divine perceptive that he should have it.)

*

I think this used to be much better understood than it is nowadays: That before someone has power, they need already to have learned the foundation lessons of integrity, responsibility, affection, sympathy, balance...

It applies to individuals, and it applies to nations and cultures. Yet not only are the foundation lessons neglected, they are not even attempted!

The situation is perilous enough when dealing with natural (divine) gifts - but the worst possible situation is when people, nations, cultures are systematically and successfully working to achieve special powers without any recognition that powers are intrinsically likely to be corrupted. And this applies to powers of all types - including medicine and healing, including art and literature, including housing and clothing... But obviously so in terms of science, technology, and bureaucratic organization.

Insofar as we fail to perceive the probability of hazards, we have chosen to misuse power - while blinding ourselves even to the possibility of misuse.

*

The situation is really very simple: it is a matter of motivation. From the divine perspective; gifts and powers in the hands of the badly motivated are a horror - and only in the hands of the well-motivated are they a good.

Since everybody claims to be well-motivated (even Gollum) - but nearly everybody is this requires discernment on the basis that people tend to be self-deluded and dishonest about their bad motivations - and what people say about their motivations needs to be compared with their actions; and their ability to maintain good motivations in the face of temptations needs to be evaluated: power does intrinsically tend to corrupt, and corrupted power is far worse than no power.

The divine perspective would therefore seem to be: Better no geniuses than corrupted genius; Better no breakthrough innovations than those which would be used with bad motivations; Better cultural decline and extinction than an unstoppable evil empire.

*

In other words, from where we are, and as we are, and what we want to be - gifts and powers, energy and determination will all do more harm than good - much more harm than good; and we cannot use the excuse that we have evil enemies and it is 'us or them' because - from a divine perspective, we may both be bad, but we may be worse because of our superior gifts and powers...

*

Therefore - the situation is that on the one hand, we in The West we have cultural decline (decline in power, achievement, capability, efficiency, courage and will) because we have rejected Christianity - because we no longer place religion above all other considerations; and on the other hand we should not even allow ourselves to hope that Western cultural decline is reversed until after there has been a Christian revival, a Great Awakening.

And if religious revival does not happen (as seems all-too-probable) then it is better that we do not reverse Western cultural decline.

Because - motivated as we now are - with our policy, propaganda and multiple laws and regulations systematically enforcing explicit moral inversion (a situation of depravity previously unknown in human history) - we are already and are still much-too-powerful

So enhancement of Western power, achievement, capability, efficiency, courage and will in the absence of prior religious revival would (from a divine perspective) likely be regarded as one of the worst possible outcomes.

*

Three sentences by William Arkle

1. We must seek not to concern ourselves with God so much as to concern ourselves with what concerns God. 

2. We must stop supposing either that we are an accident within an accident or wholly a cause within a cause.

3. It will assist us to consider the significance of the family unit as we experience it for ourselves, and to reflect that it may hold within it the secret of the underlying pattern and purpose of the whole of the manifested universes.  


Selected from page 206 of A Geography of Consciousness by William Arkle (1974)