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Though admiring of some
aspects of Oriental thought (for example, belief in incarnation), Barfield's
thought is through and through western, as the following sharp distinction
between East and West (from Worlds Apart) make apparent: "The Oriental
way is to become unborn again. The Occidental way is to grow up" (181).1
For Barfield, "The
transition from East to West--the transition of the centre of gravity of
civilization from East to West--signified the change that was taking place
in human consciousness from awareness of a sort of residual participation
in the Divine Mind, or creative Spirit, to an awareness only of exclusion
from that participation" (UV 100).
In their epistemes, East is East and West is West:
The Western
outlook is based essentially on [the] turning of man's attention to the
phenomena. which [I have called]
alpha-thinking.
This is sharply contrasted with the oriental impulse (still heard echoing
on in Plato) to refrain from the phenomena,
to remain, as it were, in the bosom of the Eternal, to disregard as irrelevant
to man's true being, all that, in his experience, which is based on "the
contacts of the senses." Oriental philosophy, hardly distinguishable from
oriental theology, is based, above all, on a determination to regard the
sense-world as Maya, or illusion.
It was for this reason that, on its rediscovery in the nineteenth century,
it made such a strong appeal to the few who were by then becoming dimly
aware that the enlightenment of the West is based on idolatry.
It is clear, however, that the way of the West lies, not back but forward;
not in withdrawal from the contacts of the senses, but in their transformation
and redemption. (SA 148)
East and West thus seek
after very different forms of consciousness:
For the
Eastern sage liberation from ordinary consciousness and the attainment
of a-consciousness entail, in effect, the absorption of ordinary consciousness.
Whereas the true Western impulse is rather to add extraordinary consciousness
to ordinary consciousness. . . . the impulse of the West
is toward liberation by 'vision" rather than liberation by absorption.
(RM 29)
The essential difference
between East and West remains their respective orientation to time and
history.
The Oriental
conception of time [Barfield explains in Saving the Appearances]
was essentially cyclic. The picture was one of eternal repetition rather
than of beginning, progress and end, and the path of the individual soul
to the bosom of eternity was a backward path of extrication from the wheels
of desire in which it allowed itself to become involved. To reach, or to
resume, the Supreme Identity with Brahma, with the Eternal, was the object
and its achievement was a matter which lay directly between the individual
and the Eternal. The Semitic way, on the other hand, was a way forward
through history and it was a way, shared indeed by the individual, but
trodden by the nation as a whole. (SA 150)2
But Barfield does not
entirely rule out some kind of reciprocal interchange or cross-pollination
between East and West and even offers a metaphoric way of understanding
such a possibility: "Perhaps one could use an electrical metaphor and speak
of East and West as two sources of potential energy and of the spark that
unites, or the current that flows, as a result of their momentary juxtaposition"
(RM 79). Moreover, he imagines the two mind-sets able to teach something
of supreme importance to each other:
I would
suggest that the East will only understand its own "path" in the terms
demanded of our own time, if it learns to link to its own tradition all
that the West has been developing as history; and conversely I hold it
equally true that the West will only understand its own history--its own
child, as it were--by learning to interpret it in terms of a "progress,"
somewhat resembling that Eastern "path" of the individual soul from terrestrial
to divine. (RM 259)
See in particular
Unancestral
Voice, Chaps. 7 & 8, "From East to West" (RCA
7-24). |
1"We
seem faced . . . ," Barfield acknowledges in "Where is Fancy Bred," "with
such a close and constant interpenetration [of East and West] as may lead
to something like a single homogenous culture over the whole face of the
globe-under the predominance no doubt (at least in its early stages) of
Western tradition and Western impulse" (RM 79-80). |
2In
Unancestral
Voice, the Meggid puts this distinction into Anthroposophical language:
He saw, then, the consciousness of the
East, with its predominately cyclic concept of time, stretching backward
into the mists of antiquity and pre-history, and that of the West, with
its contrasted linear concept, stretching forward into the future. So much
for the generalization. . . . He saw the West striving, how vigorously,
to repudiate the transformation which had brought it to birth, to expunge
the past ouf of which it had grown, and to snap the link with its own youth,
its own former being. But even more clearly than this he saw . . . the
East struggling to preserve itself intact from the appointed transformation.
Yet in the same moment he was aware, thanks to the Meggid, that it was
not the West itself that was struggling to deny transformation; it was Ahriman. And it was not the East itself that was willing to defy transformation;
it was Lucifer. (84-85)
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