The English¹ value heirarchy emerged in an implicit process; we’ve never understood its exact function; never understood how (and which) traditional psychotechnologies cultivate it. This has amplified the nihilism and de-moralisation we’re experiencing. 

For over a century the value heirarchy has been under siege: crucial traditions were implicitly imitated, generation-after-generation, then abandoned out of ignorance. This cut our people off from what makes them a people: our narrative order (the ‘why’), our psychotechnology (the ‘how’), and our value heirarchy and procedural knowledge (‘the way’). 

Today a generation of English across the globe are actively propagandised to believe they don’t exist; that they’re nothing more than a multicultural amalgam; that they have no distinct value heirarchy.

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¹ ‘English’ is to be taken as a coverall term for the US and CANZUK fundamental value hierarchy and culture throughout. 

Conceptual Problem Specified

1. We don’t understand what constitutes individual English values. The concepts and terms we use to define and label them are (a) equivocal: they mean different things to different people; they’re dead constructs that serve only to confuse. (b) invalid, inaccurate, and has always been so: they’re wooly and don’t actually map the phenomenon and its parts.
2. We say English Way of Life, but we don’t know what that ‘way’—that procedure and direction—is; we don’t know how to enact and participate in it. And the portion of the ‘English Way’ we do still enact is implicit: it’s like the fish in the river. He uses water to swim, but he can’t see water because he’s always inside water.
3. We have access to the traditional source materials¹ that express the value heirarchy²; trouble is, our understanding of them, our interpretations, are invalid because— 

(a) reductionist literalist tools were used to examine and English culture and tradition and create the dominant interpretation of it. Culture is a non-reductive phenomena and requires non-reductive tools of analysis to properly interpret them. Medieval people didn’t read King Arthur and the Green Knight like a puzzle, trying ascertain some literal meaning, they used it as a tool: ‘how can this help me?’.

(b) we abandoned ontologies that were crucial for the understanding of the symbolic language of traditions, so our interpretations are also equivocal. Even if you speak the same language you can’t understand a particular tradition if those words and symbols mapped different concepts and meanings within a different ontology.

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¹ Records and representations of rituals, practices, narratives, verse, literature, ect.
² The English way, the mythos, the narrative order, the psychotechnology, and the procedural hierarchy.

Curation & Cultivation Problem Specified

1. We lack a valid criterion to accurately curate rituals, narratives, literature, and psychotechnology which contain (and cultivate) English values, virtues, and the moral order that made us flourish.
2. Without this criterion content producers can’t reliably locate English value laden source materials, and in turn generate content laden with the value heirarchy. As a consequence, the English content producer ends-up promoting a buffet of divergent creeds thinking they constitute Englishness, yet they don’t match our internal value heirarchy and degenerate the conditions that enable us to flourish.
3. No content producers in this space have the appropriate methods of analysis to interpret and extract implicit psychotechnology from English traditional source materials.
4. Symbolic language is crucial to decoding much of English tradition, but nobody in this space speaks that language: they don’t inhabit the symbolic worldview necessary to render the symbols usable. As a consequence the materialist literalist ontology is perpetuated in the audience which inhibits their understanding of tradition and their access to the psychotechnology and narratives within that tradition which could otherwise be used to generate meaning and morale. 

Let’s define two terms in the next tab so you know what I’m talking about when I explain the solution—

Imagine a small isolated tribe. They must cross a river to hunt and survive; they can’t swim; they invent and engineer a raft to cross.  Their raft technology is made of mind material (the plan, the operation procedure) and wood material. Its functional structure exists and is operated in the river: a psychotechnology is just as real, but its functional structure exists and is operated in the mind—things like meditation, prayer, and the alphabet¹.

Implicit psychotechnologies are more subtle: imagine an isolated medieval village. Many forests are nearby. Kids have a high death rate in those forests despite being told they’re dangerous. Nothing can be done. Over time a story emerges at the tavern—Red Riding Hood—about a wolf disguising itself as human to feast on a young girl. As the story spreads the forest death rate drops—kids implicitly imitate the procedural knowledge nested in the story—and unbeknownst to the villagers this psychotechnology solves their problem. That’s an implicit psychotechnology². The narrative lives on because the villagers who know the story have a competitive advantage; If they stop using the psychotechnology the problem returns.

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¹ This includes practices with external aids like praying the rosary using rosary beads.
² Implicit psychotechnology isn't limited to narrative: it includes the unconscious secondary effects on cognition of practices like the traditional English longbow, which was once the national weekly practice of every able bodied man in England.

What is a Symbol? 

A symbol is a collection of material facts that express an unknown higher order concept¹, or complex phenomena; it’s a psychotechnology we enact to mediate and reveal that phenomena. For instance, enacting the scale of justice to understand the concept of justice: what do you do with a scale? How does it work? You enact the thing in your mind; you see it; you balance and weigh; you may sway your head left to right. The scale extends you the ability, enables you, to hold justice in mind, to grasp at it and wrestle out a better understanding.

Using the symbol actually activates the cerebellum in the brain, which controls balance, and through that process—enacting the symbol across all manner of ‘judgements’ to ‘feel out’ what is just—justice is concretised. The more you do it the more just you become. you internalise ‘justice’ as a process. 

It helps to see the symbol like an X-ray lens: you look through the scale symbol at justice—at justice beyond and by means of the symbol. The symbol (lens) reveals unknown aspects of the thing you examine; aspects you could never otherwise see like the X-ray spectrum extends our sight to see bones in the body. 

¹See appendix for in depth description.

Conceptual Solution: Greenwood Lab

Overarching mission: explicate the English value heirarchy; model its structural functional organisation; validate the model nomologically¹. 

Core goals

1. Create a new lexicon and typology to represent and define the English value & virtue heirarchy; reconstruct a system of symbols the express it².

2. Reconstruct the Value Heirarchy’s process of emergence—its causes, its consequences. 

3. Uncover traditional English psychotechnology. Test and validate their utility, their beneficial effects for individuals, experimentally with researchers. Organise them into an ecosystem of practices that integrates with the value heirarchy to promote flourishing within (and of) English culture.

4. Formalise analysis and curation tools to enable researchers and content makers to uncover the value hierarchy in source materials, locate it in culture, and express it in content. Develop pedagogic tools to aid them in teaching this knowledge to a general audience³.

5. Establish a fellowship of researchers and content makers to participate directly in the work and found new branches of the project.

Research methods summary

Adapt methods of analysis and innovations from non-reductive science & phenomenology. Use empirical evidence as far as that is possible seeking quantitative data to buttress qualitative arguments. Ultimately, validate the model with nomological methods* exapting tools from Dynamic Systems Theory, Cognitive Science, Psychology. I.e. Multi-method Multi-trait Construct Validation.

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¹ Behavioural structures are physically real insofar as they are physical arrangements of matter in the brain (interactions of neurological structure). We are modelling a hierarchy of these arrangements, and reconstructing which psychotechnologies integrates with it to generate conditions of flourishing.

² This lexicon must be accurate, yet useful, concrete, and meaningful to the common people.

³ i.e. summarise and extract procedural knowledge, behavioural patterns, from traditional narrative materials and organise into a toolbox of narratives that can be used to *express to the Englishman the essence of the value hierarchy still present in his current behavioural patterns. 
⁴ A loose definition of a nomological method: (1) Gather evidence from independent scientific fields. The greater the number of independent sources of evidence in agreement, the stronger the probability the construct is valid. The case is made stronger if those independent sources of evidence are found using divergent methods (from scientific disciplines that are also widely divergent from each other in a method) (2) Test the validity of our construct of traits (values) by confirming it is discriminant from constructs of other cultures and their traits (values). (3) Test the degree to which two traits that theoretically should be related in our model, are in fact related. (4) Test whether traits (values) that are supposed to be unrelated are, in fact, unrelated.

Why does Greenwood Lab help solve the problem?

Imagine the English way of life as an invisible castle. There’s an enemy army swarming across the land hell bent on destroying and replacing your castle; this will be achieved because they burn everything in their path. Our castle generates the conditions that allow us to flourish—if we man the walls; It’s certain we could defeat the enemy, if we man the walls. Trouble is, we only know the rough vicinity of the walls’ location, and many factions of our army disagree about what is and isn’t a real wall. 

We face this situation right now. We want to defend our way of life; we don’t know what constitutes it (what the castle is made of), or which procedures are required to cultivate it (procedures which build and locate castle walls), so we end up defending the status quo (the ground we happen to stand on not the actual castle walls), and we have no vision because we don’t understand the narrative tradition (the point—why we should even build and use castle), and we don’t understand the symbolic language the tradition is written in (we can’t read old castle plans). To solve this problem Greenwood Lab will make the essence of this castle visible, concrete, and ready to use¹. 

This conceptual work provides a propositional description of the phenomena, it’s not the phenomena itself. It’s ultimately a research tool to aid the content arm of the project. Alone it doesn’t solve the wider problem. That requires 9. Cultivation solution—

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¹ You might wonder why that is necessary. If this situation continues the value heirarchy will decay out of existence and we'll have no cultural weapons to use to fight tyranny; to rally resistance. It's far easier to enslave a people who share no values; they're a house divided against itself; they have no common interests. The ability of culture memes to inspire a response (to share them, to impel action) is generated by the value heirarchy itself—common interest incarnate. This will arm us with the tools to see that doesn't happen. 

Cultivation Solution (a) Greenwood Show (b) Greenwood Project Membership Content Platform

For clarity, let me outline the contents of this section so you know what to expect:

Below is a summary of the Greenwood show, an episode example, and glowing audience feedback. To understand how this solves the problem and why it’s so effective we must (a) unpack what a value heirarchy is; then we can (b) explicate how and why the content works; why it’s effective.

Following that we’ll (a) demonstrate the market opportunity—why the market is primed and hungry for this crop. (b) Outline the Greenwood Project membership platform—the company’s mission and goals. Then we can (c) make clear why the project as a whole is uniquely fitted to solve the problem.

(a) Greenwood Show

See fig 1. for show link

See fig 2. Audience positive response evidence

Show synopsis

Greenwood deciphers the essence of English values & virtues nested in the heroic sagas, symbols, legends & lore that cultivated English civilisation. Readings and analysis of great—and esoteric—English verse, tradition, narrative, ritual & speech to uncover hidden psychotechnologies to solve today’s problems. 

Our content’s structure summarised

Preparation 

1. we sort traditional source materials using current greenwood curation procedure. 
2. we use our unique analysis procedure to unpack the true meaning and function of source materials, and extract psychotechnology and procedural knowledge from them. 

Presentation 

1. We present the narrative (i.e. tell an original Robin Hood story from the oral tradition)
2. We unpack the true meaning of the narrative (its’ utility and symbolic meaning)
3. We present psychotechnology we’ve extracted from source materials for practical use and make their value and function explicit: practices, icons, rituals, stories, the audience can use in the real world to generate meaning and morale. This instigates active participation, not passive reception of content on a screen: understanding a ‘way of life’ only comes to us through enacting it. i.e. you can’t understand mediation without enacting a meditation habit.
4. We present supporting evidence from the sciences to satisfy the current materialist sceptical mind.
5. We compare and contrast this with modern examples of English behavioural patters; with popular literature and culture. This places the people back inside our people’s story because we’ve enabled them to recognise themselves in the mythos. 
6. We diss-illusion the audience of the materialist ontology by making explicit the meaning of traditional English symbolism in contrast with general medieval symbolism, and how that is understood within symbolic & medieval cosmology.

The powerful effects this presentation generates are made clear in the ‘why is Greenwood content so compelling?’ section. At face value this summary won’t demonstrate why the content is so effective and unique, to make that clear we must unpack what a value is—

What is a value? How do fundamental values emerge?

Values are categories of the unconscious which emote what should be done—what should be chosen or rejected—manifest in ‘feeling’ or emotive data. To value a thing means certain contents of the psyche are energetic and strong towards that thing in a sympathetic, recommendable, or objectionable manner. The values that concern us are fundamental values: those at the top of the hierarchy; those which make us distinct as a people. You can’t choose this heirarchy it’s absorbed through direct imitation (father-to-son) in the childhood development stage

A culture in the anthropological meaning of the word is a people’s heirarchy of ways (behavioural heirarchy); a ‘person’ is constituted of a behavioural heirarchy, that’s how we understand and define what a person is—using this behavioural pattern; a people, then, is best defined as a personality: a heirarchy of behaviours in semantic, episodic, and procedural forms.

What values really refer to—what the value heirarchy really is in essence—is this personality pattern: it’s the ways of behaving that we most strongly commend or object to—our ‘ways of life’. These patterns are stored in our procedural and episodic memory—and nested in the narrative representations of tradition. The heirarchy emerges as a consequence of individual adaptation to natural and social constraints at the formation of a people¹. The value heirarchy then amounts to the patterns of action of our greatest heroes arranged into one overarching personality—be they myth hero, or historical. These patterns of actions proved crucial to the flourishing and survival of their people.

The further back in the past a value is formed, the more instinctual. Ultimately our morality is not an invention, but an emotive impulse. Everywhere, in every culture, there was a Moses; even if we can’t establish their historical existence there are the laws—moral codes; and these laws are merely propositional renderings of an emotive moral instinct deriving from the value heirarchy. The heirarchy begins as procedural knowledge; it’s transmitted via imitation. Over time this procedural heirarchy comes to be represented in episodic memory as a narrative, then explicated into moral codes. A narrative is a procedure and its outcome—what a hero does and what outcome that achieves. The narrative order, then, contains the implicit hierarchical structure of historically determined procedural knowledge: it expresses our value heirarchy in accessible form. 

Myth hero narratives (i.e. the Robin Hood ballads) have no single author, but many, and must transmit through hundreds of humans to reach us. These narratives were subject to selective forces: If they work the human who imitates them has a survival advantage. If they don’t work when imitated—if the procedure fails to manifest the narrative outcome—they fail to accurately represent reality and that branch of the story dies, or the human adapts in real time, survives, and returns to the pub to tell the tale, distilling and generalising the story’s truth. This amounts to a Bayesian-like feedback loop: stories are imitated (acted out in the empirical world) then distilled based on the outcome when told in groups (around the campfire, in taverns, in pubs) which distills the narrative’s utility—the longer the tradition the more generalisable moral truth nested within it². 

We may have forgotten these narratives and never understood their crucial function in society, but the echo of their behavioural patterns are still nested in our procedural memory, passed down from father to son, manifest in our internal value heirarchy. 

Ultimately, this echo is why our content is so effective. Nobody accurately targets it; the legacy media fail to cater for it; they actively revile and invert it.

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¹ Once the dynamic system is established, individual adaptation serves to distill the utility, the truth, of the procedural knowledge, not change its priors.

² This does not mean moral relativism, it means time has distilled our procedural heirarchy into the most robust generalisable truth that works on the ground. 

Why is Greenwood content so compelling?

I hypothesise five effects that our approach is generating which makes the content compelling for US CANZUK (English) audiences: 

The Integration Effect: After watching our content audience comments describe the feeling of being told something they already knew but never had the words to describe—followed by a sense of meaning and morale. What does this mean? Cognitive science can help here: It describes four levels of knowledge: propositional, procedural, episodic, participatory; stored in semantic, episodic, and procedural memory. People have an intuitive knowledge of their cultural identity; they sense it on the procedural and episodic levels of understanding. 

This sense is emotive data from their unconscious value heirarchy—like recognising a face in a crowd is intellectual data from conscious cognition. So our content is impelling a response by integrating their procedural and episodic levels of knowledge with their propositional knowledge: their conscious logical structure with their unconscious emotive structure: their ideas of identity with their actual identity. To reiterate, we’re articulating what the audience always felt about their commonalities as a people on the procedural level of understanding and making it explicit to them in the intellect¹.

The Teleological Effect: by curating source materials that align with the English value heirarchy, we are setting ourselves up to put a round box in a round hole; competitors force a square box through a round hole. When we contrast behavioural patterns we unpack from the narrative tradition with the modern Englishman’s behavioural patterns we do the same thing—the values match. Round box meets round hole. As a consequence they gain a greater sense of their place and their point: they are placed back inside their story rather than watching it from the outside as a disinterested observer generating a sense of belonging morale.

The Participatory Effect: Legacy media seeks passive dependence, we promote active flourishing. Modernity’s centralisation of folk (myth) storytelling, has made us passive receivers of—and bit players in—other peoples’ stories. This is alien to our nature: our narrative tradition evolved through participation of the wider populace. Robin Hood wasn’t a movie; he was a character to be enacted and imitated: every local village participated directly in plays, songs, rituals, and stories, and as a consequence distilled the truth of Robin’s character. When we present psychotechnology and procedural knowledge we’ve extracted from tradition, we enable the audience to use tradition as it was intended: to know the story of their people by participating directly in it. This is buttressed by cognitive science: participatory knowledge cannot be possessed like propositional knowledge. It must be enacted to be known. It’s a mode of being.

Utility Renovelization Effect: we think we understand our tradition and our culture. All we understand is the shitty strawman obscuring the tradition’s actual function. This is the materialist literalist illusion that pervades the academy, the media, and the institutions. When we explain the utility in scientific terms the modern skeptical mind is abated, giving the audience the ability to see the true value tradition. It makes the old new again: In other words, the content is compelling because utility is revealed within traditional and cultural materials the audience thought useless. This amounts to a first step deprograming of materialist ontology, walking into a pragmatic one.

Ontological Revelation Effect: across multiple episodes we invite the audience into medieval ontology; the mindsets of the people who lived traditions. As the audience learn the language they notice symbolic patterns in the cultural world around them, patterns across different source materials. They begin to see how it all interrelates. This amounts to a slow burn revelatory experience—like a good twist in a movie: everything we thought we knew about traditions we’ve ignored all our lives is subverted to reveal a hidden higher meaning. This effect generates a sense of meaning and moral. This is also buttressed by cognitive science: perspectival knowledge can only be known through experiencing the perspective shift. 

All these effects are not achieved in every program; I have explicated them to present our approach as a whole.

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¹ Jordan Peterson's biblical lectures achieve the same effect, and have a buffet of comments that describe the same response from the audience. 

Project Opportunity

English tradition has never been adapted into a pedagogy like bible study: It emerged in an implicit process; it functioned behind the scenes. Its narratives were spread for pleasure, not because storytellers intended to instruct. This means English tradition is untapped oil; pregnant with psychotechnologies just begging to be explicated and utilised; pregnant with—for all intents and purposes—new inventions. What’s more, this oil is inaccessible to legacy competitors because they’re enforced to see it as taboo by institutional group think, or their materialist literalist worldviews can’t frame the oil as anything but useless. 

Some may think ‘none of that matters, no one will be receptive to this, the legacy media and institutions have the high ground’. My response: that highground is a grift; a Potemkin’s Village. If anything, it helps us, and here’s why—

Communications technology centralised the transmission and generation of narrative with a handful of media companies. Centralised Institutions implicitly enforced the interpretation and understanding of tradition through a system of punishment and incentives. This centralisation made legacy media companies and institutions an ideal target for cultural marxists and ideologies who took possession of them. Technology put a broadcast studio in everyones home. This allowed for Dissident media to emerge that spent a decade redpilling the audience on legacy media propaganda and lies. 

As a consequence, trust in media and institutions is at an all time low; their validation is worth nothing to a large section of the audience; they no longer control the high ground. These conditions allow for the entrenched interpretation of our tradition to be completely subverted, and institutional enforcement to be bypassed. For the first time we can go directly to the audience without seeking the validation of gatekeepers. We have lower costs, lower barriers to entry. We aren’t burdened by large overheads. Now more than ever the audience is seeking truth and authenticity over flashy effects and production value. They’re no longer ‘fans’ they’re ‘supporters’, yet the centralised media and institutions incentivise holding the audience at bay, seeking fan’s and worshipers. It’s clear the audience expect a relationship with content makers. We promote that direct relationship. This situation both raises their marketing costs and lowers ours; lowers the potency of their content and raises ours; lowers the authority and trust in their content and raises ours.

A parallel economy is emerging, lead by alt tech. The time is ripe for a project and platform like this to join that economy: the woke occupation of legacy media companies has created an emergent market segment: we’ll call this ‘Authentic English’ value laden content. By propagandising their product they are no longer providing for English audience needs; so large is this deficit that what they gain in flashy effects and production value no longer compensates for the demoralising effects of attacking and inverting our values in their narrative content.

A market previously thought stagnant, with high barriers to entry, proves ripe for disruption. This is demonstrated by Marvel comics nosedive 2016, Netflix subscriber losses 2018, Disney Star Wars toys and rides slump 2018; they all map on to the timeframe of the woke possession of these companies. Netflix surveys and sales data reveal the audience overwhelmingly preferred to watching decades old unpropegandised content than the latest woke releases. It’s clear that go woke does indeed mean go broke whilst our value heirarchy still exists within the audience. The audience would rather watch a lone broadcaster tell a story that’s imbued with their values verbally on youtube, than sit through a Star Wars trilogy that vilifies everything we value and the characters we love.  The longer this goes on the greater our competitive advantage—and the demand for this content—will be: if content aligns with the fundamental value heirarchy, all else being equal, the more impelling it is. Woke occupation, then, both raises their costs and lowers our entry barriers.

(b) Greenwood Project Membership & Content Platform

Overarching mission 

Establish a membership content platform which supplants the academy and legacy media’s monopoly over the interpretation of English tradition and literature; over the definition and cultivation of English values and virtues. 

Mission complete looks like this: If the English (and Americans) want to understand the fundamentals of our culture, they come to us, not the BBC; not Oxford (not the American equivalents)

Core goals

1. Establish and distribute a content slate that deciphers English tradition and literature, explicating the English value and virtue heirarchy and the psychotechnology that cultivates it, for the English audience at large.
2. Host and distribute a system of practices and psychotechnology the English can use to cultivate meaning and amply their common bonds—In other words, return to the common people the means of participating in their tradition and mythos.
3. Host and establish membership self-organisation and project participation: members actively contribute content and help build a library of psychotechnology and knowledge. Talent is promoted from within the audience, by the audience, and their content is upvoted to the front page and broadcasted to the greenwood audience at large on the Greenwood show.
4. Educate Greenwood members in the symbolic world view (medieval & darkage cosmology) and in the use of our analysis and curation tools so they can contribute to the project and its goals directly (creating their own content). In other words: empower the audience to empower the project.
5. Establish a contributors portal; an intranet on the website to collaborate and train with talented researchers, writers, editors, content makers. In other words, create a potent distributed cognition to light a fire under this rocket. 
6. Establish and promote in person local clubs: Greenwood Order fellowships for enacting and testing the psychotechnology, developing aspiration, self betterment, meaning, and flourishing within an English traditional framework.

Appendix: The Symbol in detail

It helps to understand what as symbol is not: the old custom of handing over a piece of turf at the sale of land may be described as symbolic in the casual use of the word but it is actually semiotic: the piece of turf is a sign, a token, standing in for the whole estate. It makes nothing explicit about the estate when used, it doesn’t express or have anything intricate to do with the estate—nothing like the scale, which does express the function of justice. The winged wheel badge worn by railway staff is not a symbol of the railway, but a sign that distinguishes the employees of the railway system. A symbol always presupposes that its chosen expression is the best possible description or formulation of a relatively unknown thing which is nevertheless known or professed to exist. So, when the badge of the railway employee is explained as a symbol, it amounts to saying he has something to do with—somehow optimises and expresses—the entire railway system in a way that cannot be differently of better expressed, described, formulated, than by a winged wheel.

‘Every view which interprets the symbolic expression as an abbreviated designation for a known thing is semiotic; a view which interprets the symbolic expression as the best possible formulation of a relatively unknown thing, which for that reason cannot be more clearly or characteristically represented, is symbolic. The symbol is alive only so long as it is pregnant with meaning; It is only pregnant with meaning while it expresses something that cannot be characterised in any other or better way. But once its meaning has been born out of it, once that expression is found which formulates the thing sought, expected, or divined even better than the accepted symbol, then the symbol is dead, It becomes merely a conventional sign, pointing to the new expression that better maps the thing sought. An expression that stands for a known thing remains a mere sign and is never a symbol.  A symbol that once enacted renders a thing known in entirety, becomes a sign; it now is merely an association to recall the knowledge of the thing in the memory.

For instance, the consciousness that interprets the cross as (only) ‘divine love’ has killed the symbol—has made it a sign—because “divine love” describes the fact to be expressed better and more aptly than a cross, which can have many other meanings. Symbols must be enacted and participated in to remain symbols, else them become merely of historic interest. On the other hand, an interpretation of the cross is symbolic when it puts the cross beyond all conceivable explanations, regarding it as expressing a multifaceted, higher order and as yet unknown and incomprehensible fact of a transcendent nature, which simply finds itself most appropriately represented in the cross. That interpretation presumes it is a psychotechnology that maps a phenomena that is beyond explicating.

For the most part we don’t actually use symbols anymore, we don’t enact them, we just look at them and see signs, representations, synonyms. When we learn the scale stands for justice, that’s the end of it: It’s never enacted, and that attitude kills the symbol. Yet participation is a requirement for their function as a psychotechnology. The materialist ontology has framed our attitude, and killed a host of symbols that would otherwise by living, have great utility, and be the most effective means of understanding higher order phenomenon. When we understand medieval cosmology, when we understand symbolic language, we find many symbols provide the most efficient and effective means of expressing higher order complex concepts, patterns, phenomena we find ourselves confounded by in modern life.

Whether a thing is a symbol or not also depends on the attitude of the observing consciousness; for instance, on whether it regards a given fact not merely as such but also as an expression for something unknown. Hence it is quite possible for a man to establish a fact which does not appear in the least symbolic to himself, but is profoundly so to another consciousness. The attitude that takes a given phenomenon as symbolic may be called, for short, the symbolic attitude. It is only partially justified by the actual behaviour of things; for the rest, it is the outcome of a definite view of the world which assigns meaning to events, whether great or small, and attaches to this meaning a greater value than to bare facts. This view of things stands opposed to another view which lays the accent on sheer facts and subordinates meaning to them. For the latter attitude there can be no symbols whatever when the symbolism depends exclusively on the mode of observation. A symbol really lives only when it is the best and highest expression for something divined but not yet known to the observer. It then compels his unconscious participation and has a life-giving and life-enhancing effect.