Dear all, I would like to make an announcement which I hope and believe some of you will welcome: I am going to start offering coaching and counselling to anyone who is interested in such services, anywhere in the world, via the Internet – insofar as I have the time and the energy for it. The only requirements for “admission” would be that you are reasonably fluent in English, or in Norwegian or Swedish or Danish, and that you have a reasonably open mind and a strong, genuine desire to improve your life situation or learn more about one or several of the topics I consider myself to be proficient in.

In practice, this might take the form of 40-minute-conversations via Zoom (the free application), for example, and the initial “consultation”, i.e. the mapping out of your predicament and the gauging of what, if anything, I might be able to offer you with regards to help and advice, would be free of charge, and without obligations of any kind.

As some of you already know or have gathered, I hold a master’s degree in theology (in my case the equivalent of five and a half years of full-time studies) and had, while I was still working on that degree, back in early 2020, planned to become a priest in one of the Christian churches here in Norway. For a number of reasons, however, which I might elaborate on in future posts and essays, pursuing that kind of career eventually turned out to be both impossible and highly undesirable – one being moderate but chronic health problems having to do with eye strain and exhaustion, a second being the severely compromised or even corrupt condition of all the major church institutions, and even of “mainstream” modern Christianity itself, and a third having to do with the numerous surprising and shocking intellectual discoveries and realizations I made in private over the course of the years I was a student – realizations and discoveries which, to put it very simply, would make spending the rest of this brief earthly life on either the active promotion of or the quiet acquiescing in the claims and the dogmas of “ordinary” Christianity, and particularly those pertaining to the status of the “Old Testament”, the nature of “Israel” and the identity and mission of Jesus Christ unconscionable and an act of duplicity, dishonesty and cowardice. I know that may strike some as hyperbole, or as offensive, but I can assure you that I have very good grounds for saying what I am saying.

The road I have chosen instead, which is similar to the road I was on before I commenced my formal theology study in 2015, cannot be described and explained in a few words, but is the outcome of a very long psychological and spiritual journey that has involved a great deal of both reading and reflection and intellectual and spiritual exploration, and which I have, at least to some extent, been on since I was in my late teens, and I first began wrestling with philosophical questions and searching for a deeper and more satisfying meaning to human existence, many years ago. The theology study was, to a very great extent, only an extension of and an add-on to what I had already been doing privately for some ten or fifteen years before I was enrolled as a student, and then the study program did not turn out in the way I had initially expected.

I am mentioning all this to give potential future clients and students an indication of where I stand and what I might be able to offer in terms of knowledge and life experience. My present worldview, which is a constant process of formation and re-formation, is largely (but not completely) identical to that of Platonism, the “philosophy-religion” which one could say was the spiritual lifeblood of ancient Greece, even though competing views abounded even then, and which exerted a vast and today often hugely underestimated or under-communicated influence on both emerging and medieval Christianity, and on Judaism and Islam as well, and which, in my estimation, constituted the essence of the peculiar and “upward” way of thinking that underpinned our European and later “Western” civilization – even though there were numerous other influences as well – until the great and fateful cataclysms of the Protestant Revolution and its nominalism and proto-empiricism, of the materialistic and reason-centric “Enlightenment” fostered by the Freemasonic lodges and Adam Weishaupt’s infamous Illuminati brotherhood, of the terrible “world wars” of the twentieth century and of the unhinged radicalism and psychopathy and chaos of late Modernity gradually, through a series of horrible blows, as well as a thousand invisible cuts, almost brought that difficult-to-define blend of ideas which had perhaps reached its first peak in Greco-Roman civilization, and its second in the High Medieval Era, to a strange and puzzling end. The fact that virtually the whole upper part of the political establishment is corrupt, that no a single Western country has a birth rare capable of sustaining its population, and that almost all political and bureaucratic decisions appear to be nudging us closer to a totalitarian or “Anti-Christ” World Order, seem to be mere symptoms of a great “darkening” of the Mind which began a long time ago.

In the Hindu or Vedic Lawbook of Manu, it is stated of the nature of the four ages that together constitute a Maha-Yuga or Great Age that:

“In the Krita the prevailing virtue is declared to be in devotion; in the Treta, divine knowledge; in the Dvapara, holy sages call sacrifice the duty chiefly performed; in the Kali, liberality alone.” (Manava Dharma Shastra, 1:86)

That “liberality alone” is now the prevailing virtue strikes me a very appropriate description of where we are at today – even though this is a generalization, of course, and all generalizations are inherently inaccurate, and therefore open to dispute.

As for Platonism, you can find a good introduction to the Platonic Tradition, which aligns well with my views, here:

“Walking the Platonic Path – exploring the philosophy of the Platonic tradition. Introduction.” URL: https://youtu.be/aNLCqNF5UUE

Another important component of my worldview is the collection of statements and aphorisms and tenets I tend to look on as the authentic teachings of Christ – the gist and spirit of which differ drastically from both the foremost doctrines and the actual emphasis and real-world activities of most contemporary churches, but which express concepts which seem to have very much in common with both Platonism and other ancient religio-philosophical traditions advocating for the knowing of oneself, for the finding of a metaphorical inner kingdom and for the leading of a life of justice (righteousness) and ahimsa (non-violence or harmlessness) and the seeking of direct Communion with the Divine.

One might say that these two bodies of knowledge complement one another – some of the aphorisms and parables attributed to Christ exhibit a touching or stirring quality which is not, in my estimation, found in the surviving Greek philosophical literature, generally speaking, but these utterances of Christ have come down to us in a form lacking both intellectual context and philosophical justification, while the predicament of Greek philosophy, in the form it has been preserved, is the exact reverse of that, namely that it fails to truly move the heart, at least until one has become capable of seeing the grandeur to which the webs of words refer, but is capable of explaining and rendering comprehensible many of the expressions and concepts which to the reader of the gospels in isolation cannot but remain highly mysterious, and perhaps even absurd.

Both of these expressions or representations of what was once experiences, teachings and communications far surpassing that which words can express, are unaccompanied by sufficiently clear and credible methods for the actual, real-life achievement of the goals expressed, however, and this is where the philosophical schools of India may be able to come to our aid, since we there find living traditions teaching all the practical techniques and observances which in the West appear to have been forgotten, or perhaps rather outlawed and eradicated, long ago.

As a great Victorian scholar of spiritual affairs observes in her works, ancient philosophical traditions like Platonism have been torn between two different poles and distorted by two competing currents of thought for a very long time now – first the craving to eliminate all doubt and all dissent, and make the life of the mind conform to a set of rather poorly defined dogmas, which culminated in the forbidding of the public teaching of philosophy, including Platonic philosophy, the forcible closure of the ancient academy in Athens, the appropriation of the very name of religion and the forcing of philosophy itself into a state of subordination and servitude and humiliation, carried out by the institutionalized churches, which thus created the false dichotomies between reason and religion, and between “true religion” and “paganism”, which have been afflicting the world ever since, and then, much later, the equally damaging misconstrual and distortion of the same philosophy perpetrated by the fanatical narrow rationalism exalted by the so-called Enlightenment (thereby making Enlightenment in the ancient Platonic and mystical sense impossible, paradoxically enough), which sought to appropriate and exploit the glory then still associated with ancient Greece and Rome for its own devious and malevolent and even anti-civilizational ends, and to portray ancient personages like Socrates as paragons of the exercise of a narrow and purely discursive and calculating and logical kind of reason, and as pioneering sceptics and subversives and revolutionaries, while unabashedly ignoring both Socrates’ own references to the arcane sciences of the Pythagoreans, to initiation into the Mysteries at Eleusis, to an unspeakably grand philosophical theology, resembling the one Christ seems to have taught, to Divine Kingship and to the existence of the supernatural in general.

On top of all that, a pervasive, aggressive materialism, arising partly out of the psychological and institutional mayhem wrought by the “Enlightenment” and the subversive preparations for it, partly out of the Christian or perhaps rather Abrahamic divesting of the natural environment of its clear spiritual and religious significance, and partly out of an understandable but misguided mental and cultural wave of reaction to all the innumerable outrageous excesses of the past, including, but not limited to all the prohibitions and all the fanaticism and all the hypocrisy and all the horrendous acts of war, has made the ancient Platonic worldview even more difficult to fathom.

Nevertheless, I think we can retrieve it, and that we should retrieve it, and that we must retrieve it if this rapidly crumbling civilization of ours is to have a future worth having, and the hope of an Afterlife still evokes at least a flicker of optimism and longing within us – all that is necessary to begin to the process needed is an act of will, if the will can still be mustered, and a mental turning away from all the superficial lures of everyday life and of this world, and towards that luminous and wonderful other path which you may at first only be able to glimpse, as through a keyhole full of dust, but which will gradually come to radiate towards you from a place both within and beyond the visible tapestry of existence, as it were, as when a doorway leading out of a lavishly furnished yet ultimately profoundly dissatisfying living space has finally been opened up, allowing you to gaze out on an old and verdant garden of previously inconceivable beauty and sophistication, fading into the distance, and glowing in the light of the Sun – and when you see and feel it, all the quiet tragedy and fearful emptiness and hidden dread that has been weighing you down, whether fully consciously or partly unconsciously, if you are a typical modern human being, like a stone around your neck, for much of your life, and which may well have caused you to be tempted to escape it all, or to give the proverbial finger to it all, whether only for a while, by way of the fake and dangerous stupor or euphoria of alcohol or drugs or debauchery, or permanently, by way of doing violence to yourself, will gradually, or maybe not so gradually, begin to fade into the background, as when one after a long and harrowing night steps outside and into the golden light of the early morning sun, and all the phantoms of one’s nightmares are rendered powerless and dispelled.

If I could commence this process at the age of 18, as a naïve young man, almost completely stuck in a mental cocoon of grotesque materialism and biological determinism, and effectively without any kind of truly spiritual guidance or support, and lodged in an environment of almost total atheism, dominated by the prosaic and the petty-minded, and by the cult of utility, where the only sources of Transcendent Beauty were the remnants of pristine nature and of the art and architecture of the distant past, then you can almost certainly do it too.

In addition to what I have outlined above – my knowledge and my life experience – I can also offer you my “INFJ-ness”. Although the INFJ personality type has become to object of a great deal of hype and hyperbole and “click-baiting” and “AI slop” lately, there is no doubt in my mind that it describes a real phenomenon and a rare confluence and arrangement of certain traits, and that I belong to it, insofar as it is possible to describe a unique human individual, which is what we all are, with a soul and a free will, by way of a category based on an assessment of dominant and subordinate mental faculties or powers.

Coming to the realization that I am an INFJ, which I only did a few years ago, has been very helpful in terms of obtaining a greater degree of self-understanding, identifying strengths and weaknesses, bettering my ability to communicate who I really am on the inside and fathoming why I have never been able to feel completely at home in or fit into any of the societies and groups I have been a member of. It would have been exceedingly useful and comforting to have had this knowledge of myself at a much earlier stage in my life, both with regard to all the compulsory school years and the choice of higher education and a career and the search for love, but then perhaps I would not have had the journey I was supposed to have in this world.

However that may be, I can certainly offer you my empathy, my intuition, my pattern recognition and my visions of what might be, as opposed to what is – which are some of the foremost characteristics of my type, it seems – within bounds, of course.

However dreadful and ugly the world becomes, I never cease to envision what it could be, or could have been, and was, and however chaotic and confusing it all seems, I never cease identifying underlying patterns and intentions, and however difficult my strange inner inklings are to put into words, I never stop feeling them and attempting to give them creative expression, and however overwhelming the evil and the cruelty becomes, I never stop caring and dreaming.

In a world that is becoming ever more inhumane and inhuman, both when it comes to everyday life and the so-called built environment and the trajectories being foisted onto our societies, we can still choose to be human together, and to become increasingly human, and what we really are, or ought to be, or might be, by helping one another to persevere and prevail, and to traverse the paths that are nevertheless available to us.

If you are thirsty for meaning and significance and mystery and beauty and goodness and hope and dignity, but also for benevolent criticism and sheer honesty and naked truth and inconvenient realism and the perennial heroic struggle, then this is the place for you.

All the best,

Edmund Schilvold