List of features of our fallen nature

Here's a list of features of false personality categorized:

FOUNDATION OF FALSE PERSONALITY:

1. Sleep
2. Imaginary 'I'
3. Many 'I's (lack of unity)
4. Buffers
5. Self-Will (Self-Will opposes the Work)
6. Integral Lies (i.e. lies you're not aware of like thinking you're awake, or that you can do things, etc.)
7. Vanity & Pride

BASIC FEATURES OF FALSE PERSONALITY:

1. Identifying
2. Internal-Considering
3. Lack of Presence (Lack of Self-Remembering)
4. Expressing Emotional Energy Negatively (i.e. Negative Emotion)
5. Out-of-Control Talking & Out-of-Control, and Negative, Imagination
6. General Lying & Self-Justifying
7. Formatory Thinking (i.e. using Formatory Thinking for ALL your thinking)

VARIOUS TOOLS OF FALSE PERSONALITY:

1. Mechanical Roles
2. Vain, Prideful, (Self-Glorifying), and/or Dishonest Self-Pictures
3. Negative or Useless Attitudes
4. Fake Suffering
5. Mechanical Associations
6. Mechanical Dislikes, and Opinions
7. Mechanical Annoyances (Including also ‘making requirements’ which is a sort of vain, self-centered impatience with anything and everything – traffic, people, objects, weather, etc. – that aren’t exactly as you ‘require’ them to be)

* * * * * * *

3 Big Features of our Fallen Nature:

Self-Justifying, Resentment (without even a notion of the very concept of gratitude), Violence and/or Self-Pity

(Splash SIN in red paint over all of this. The point is, though, to have practical, pin-point things to observe in ourselves. Things that stay in the dark and we don't see in ourselves until we have a language to see them.)

+++++++

Some positive things:

Separation
Aim
New Thinking/Active Reasoning
Effort/Zeal/Super Effort

Self-Remembering
Observation of Features of False Personality
Non-Identifying
Non-Internal-Considering
External-Considering
Transforming Negative Emotion

+++++++

Conscious Labor / Intentional Suffering

_______
[The above list was put together from various Work books (Fourth Way, Ouspensky). This has been called practical, or esoteric, Christianity. It is not establishment Christianity. Which is good, because establishment Christianity is various degrees shallow to purely Satanic; and pretty much always has been. The terms above have to be understood from the sources. Start with Fourth Way by Ouspensky. In real book form. The online versions are not good for many reasons. It's not for everybody, but it's available to anybody. Regeneration, discernment from the Holy Spirit, and a pretty well-rounded true development (intellectual, emotional, physical) needed. A balanced development.]

Performative contradiction

An example of performative contradiction by a postmodernist is when they say truth statements are not possible. So that means what they just said is meaningless. They contradict themselves in the very act of making their assertion.

What false and reductionist worldviews demand is that they be allowed to be an exception to what they are declaring for everybody else.

Then if you pin them and they retreat to a nihilhist position they still have the same problem because the same language they use to declare nihilism (there is no meaning) has meaning.

Whether they like it or not they exist within the Logos, and the language they use has meaning. - C.

ps- Philosophers hate worldview analysis. I picked up on this when first getting into it. You'd see it in comments and forums. Because it nukes them so easily. Strikingly easily. It's synonymous with the biblical description of the fallen Satan. This is what was confounding the world? This?

5 points regarding worldview analysis

[This was an email.]

1. The first thing about worldview analysis is simply encountering the fact of the existence of different worldviews. Before seeing in a catalogue type of setting we tended to conflate them all into a mush. So the taxonomy aspect is the first impression that is striking.

2. The second thing is finally seeing how philosophy does play a real role in how people think and act. Prior to having worldview as a subject to attach philosophy to and give philosophy a practical context a common-sense person is likely to dismiss to some degree or completely the subject of philosophy.

3. The third thing that worldview does for a person in our era is untangle the very ubiquitous onslaught of post-modernism. The witch's brew of post-modernist beliefs and tactics scramble the minds of the unknowing to a great degree.

4. Then the subject of worldview analysis forces you, inevitably, to focus on Christianity as a lens to see the world and engage the world.

5. Overall worldview analysis enables a Christian to do more effective battle with the world; just as the Work [Fourth Way, Ouspensky] enables us to do more effective battle with our fallen nature; and just as the Bible and biblical doctrine enables us to battle the wiles of the Devil. The three-front war against the world, the flesh, and the Devil. - C.

ps- One of the criticisms from Christians of the concept of worldview is it can seem to make Christianity just one of many different worldviews. Sort of make it equal to any other worldview.

This quote is good in explaining how that is not the case:

"The condition of the heart constitutes what Dooyeweerd calls the "religious ground motive" (grondmotief) which determines the substance of theories and the makeup of worldviews. According to the Dutch professor, there are two fundamental religious ground motives, "two central mainsprings operative in the heart of human existence" One is born of the spirit of holiness, and the other of the spirit of apostasy. The ground motive of the Holy Spirit is derived from the divine Word-revelation and is the key to understanding the Bible: "the motive of creation, fall, and redemption by Jesus Christ in the communion of the Holy Ghost." The ground motive of apostasy leads away from the true God and culminates in idolatry: "As a religious dynamis (power), it leads the human heart in an apostate direction, and is the source of all deification of the creature. It is the source of all absolutizing of the relative seen in the theoretical attitude of thought. By virtue of its idolatrous character, its religious ground-motive can receive very diverse contents."74 Thus, on this basis, Dooyeweerd concludes that worldviews are not the most deeply rooted thing in the soil of the heart. Rather, religion or faith is. The religion of the heart is the cause; the philosophies and worldviews are the cognitive effect. Worldviews and philosophies stand side by side as the intellectual siblings of religious parentage."

That's from the Naugle book (Worldview: The History of a Concept) mentioned previously.

Law

I'm going to keep talking about law because it's so pervasive yet invisible to us.

Islam is all law and no gospel. Totalitarian states are all law and no gospel. When you have law minus the gospel you have the formula for the demonic. Because law is then distorted, twisted, and turned upside-down from what it truly is: God's perfect law.

There is no law other than God's law. When we aren't in harmony with God's law (as Adam was in the garden) God's law becomes a curse. And it is used by fallen angels and fallen man to coerce and imprison and destroy. Fallen angels are administrators of false religions. Fallen man administers repressive governments. Fallen humans also control at the social level other humans using finger wagging of various degrees of fierceness. This is all the use of God's law, tbough distorted and twisted, if not utterly turned upside-down.

How does the law have this power? Sin, and the presence of death. The presence of sin in us is the power of the law. The dictator looks at his mass subjects and says, "You know you're guilty. You know you're polluted." This is why the prisoner of the police state goes to his cell or his hanging half knowing he deserves it.

And the existence of death provides fear and a punishment. Mere suffering short of death as well. The prospect of suffering and death gives power to the law as fallen angels and fallen man wield it. And again, the law becomes twisted and distorted as it is wielded by fallen angels and fallen man. Without the gospel it is demonic to begin with.

This understanding of the law is the tangible thing that we live in and under. The smothering thing that weighs on us and constricts and coerces us. The medium we live within. We can't escape it. We can only use the friction from it to develop. And of course as believers we are free of its curse aspect. To develop within it is to follow the commands and teachings of Jesus Christ. Gratitude over resentment, for everything, all the time. Love God, and love your neighbor as yourself. Be awake and love your enemy. Conscious labor and intentional suffering. These teachings are how to do battle with the demonic use of the law against us so as to grow in grace...until glory... - C.

Establishment Christianity

Christianity is at best shallow, at worst demonic when it becomes establishment.

Why is that? What is establishment?

In the concise biblical way of putting it: establishment is fear of the world.

Fear God alone, it is the beginning of wisdom. When you fear God alone you don't fear the world or man or man's opinion of you. You also aren't drawn down to the lowest common denominator. You're also not in the environment of respecters of persons or vain and asinine man made hierarchies.

Establishment Christianity also always veers leftward and downward. Always.