A New Age Religion

Over the last 100 years people have looked all over the place for spiritual enlightenment, often adopting various forms of what has become known as New Age spirituality which was regarded as a more advanced form of religious understanding with greater insights than conventional approaches. It is true that, as the last post pointed out, the churches have fallen away from the purity of truth because they have become infected by secularism, but the fact remains that the real New Age religion is Christianity and we only fail to recognise this because we are so used to it. Read the Gospels, particularly that of St John, and you will see why this is so. Christ brought something entirely new to the world which was the chance of entrance to a new creation in which the material or outer was made fully transparent to the spiritual or inner. He made possible the union of Heaven and Earth, and this was expressed symbolically by the New Jerusalem, a city built by God though with the aid of man, all of whose real creativity goes into the construction. The fact that the original garden of Eden becomes the heavenly city of Jerusalem shows we are not just returning to the paradisiacal perfection of eternity but, through time, forging something entirely new.

The New Age religions of the 20th century were really just jumbles of ancient beliefs mashed up together and presented as new. But there was nothing new about any of it. They included bits of ancient paganism with a smattering of Eastern mysticism, a touch of occultism and a seasoning of psychically received messages from the inner planes, some worthwhile, most not, but none of this was new as such. It did point to the immanence of God which was a good corrective to the conventional Christian idea of God as largely transcendent, but it was also heavily influenced by what you might call the Babylonian Mystery religion which is one of the oldest false paths around, going right back to the Fall of Man and the attempt to become a god independently of God. New Age religion was not demonic as such but it had the potential to become so because it was focused more on gaining experience in the psychic and spiritual worlds than on sanctifying the soul. The demons can give mystical highs or the semblance of them but they cannot convey the sense of the holy, and it is holiness not spirituality that opens the door to the real New Age when Man will enter into full communion with God.

Do You Follow Man or God?

 

I believe absolutely in the truth of Christ, and yet I do not belong to an established church or spiritual organization of any kind. I might even go so far as to say it’s because I believe in Christ that I do not belong to any church. The reason is that we are living in that time known as the latter days in Christian eschatology, and this is a time of spiritual decline during which all outer forms of spirituality, including those religions which have previously promoted and protected truth, are falling away from the purity of their original vision. But that is not the only problem for while these avenues to truth were more than sufficient to satisfy man’s spiritual needs in the past, they all arose at a time when human consciousness was rather different to what it is now so they can no longer perform their function effectively.

The fact is outward forms of religion are right and necessary for souls at a certain stage but there comes a time when the individual needs to transfer his attention away from the outer path to the inner, and that often means going beyond conventional religion. In the past that was not so necessary but in these end times it is increasingly the case. If a religion is made up of body and soul, which are the outer structure and the inner animating vision, it is surely obvious that in a time of materialism the body will loom large while the soul will recede. The religion turns into an institution which means it is no longer a real religion.

And from that arises my chief complaint against the modern churches which is that they have all allowed themselves to be corrupted by “this world”. All too often they now conceive of spirituality horizontally, which means their eyes are fixed on human beings rather than God. Doubtless this is part of a demonic attempt to undermine truth, but it is aided and abetted by the feeble quality of church leaders who, for the most part, are not men of vision, still less saints or mystics, but administrators and bureaucrats, more concerned with their organisation than divine truth. The result has been they have conceded more and more ground to the modernist ideology of worldly progress, and now have values little different from the current left/liberal ethos which is founded on the centrality of the human being as he appears to be in this world. This is a process that has been ongoing for well over a century, but has really picked up speed over the last few decades. 

The result is that much official Christianity is now a hollowed-out shell. It has followed the world instead of renouncing it. It has succumbed to the temptation of appearing loving rather than actually being loving, and it has done this because it has misconceived love, restricting it to a kind of non-judgmental egalitarianism due to the earthly self rather than the developing soul. Tolerance, currently meaning full acceptance of pretty much anything regardless of what it is, has become more important to it than truth. That has inevitably led to a loss of truth and a disconnect from the transcendent God with the result that many churches now seem more concerned with matters of social justice than spiritual transformation. And all this has come about because contemporary Christianity has made the huge mistake of trying to compromise with the modern world. 

Many branches of Christianity have followed that path and despiritualised themselves. They have become absorbed into the modern anti-spiritual mindset because they were not strong enough to resist it. The spirituality of the leaders and members of these branches of religion has been too shallow, too insubstantial and too little felt for them to be able to shake off the influences of this world. Consequently, they have accommodated themselves to it, become part of it and are now not only indistinguishable from it but actively fight on its side and against real religion if by that we mean, as we should, spiritual truth.

Official Christianity has compromised. The trouble with compromise is that it tends to assume truth lies between two extremes. But does truth lie between the extremes of right and wrong? Does it lie between God and no God, between truth and a lie? Evidently not, but when a lie is powerful enough, and almost universally accepted, it can take on the mantle of a truth. The only thing to do then is to reject it and point out its falseness. You cannot make a compromise with it or you will be infected by it and the infection will spread, eventually taking over completely. This is what has happened in the Western world which has set the agenda for everywhere else.

The only justification for a religion is that it is a doorway to the supernatural. When the doorway is open the religion functions as it should. But when the supernatural is no longer the absolute be all and end all of the religion it is spiritually defunct even if it carries on existing, even if it grows and spreads.

This is based on a chapter from Remember The Creator. 

The Decomposition of the World

Here is a short excerpt from my book about the end times. 

An important point to grasp about the end times is that they are the result of a process of decomposition. In old age the body breaks down and then it breaks up and is returned to the elements whence it arose, eventually to provide material for new life. This is what is taking place in the world today, and it is a natural part of the stage of the cycle in which we now live. That is one aspect of our current situation.

However, taking advantage of this process, riding on its back, as it were, are the dark forces which have the aim of separating human beings from their divine origins, partly to use them as energy sources since they can no longer receive energy directly from God so they must take it in a downgraded form, partly to make psychic slaves which can serve them and partly because that is the nature of a being voided of light which is what they are and why their name is what it is. You have, therefore, this dual process in which natural decay is hurried along with deliberate stimulation and encouragement, and it applies to the psychological and spiritual realms even more than to the physical. Not true spiritual but spiritual as it is perceived and visualised in terms of the human mind.

Once you understand that our modern world is in a state of spiritual decay much about it becomes clearer. Our material affluence is both an inheritance from the past and the result of focus on the material plane, but it hides a yawning chasm of spiritual emptiness. Even liberalism, surprising as it may sound to the mind brought up on it, is the result of intellectual and moral decomposition, order dissolving into disorder and structure into chaos, which is not to say that conservatism in our day is any solution as that is mostly just a reaction against liberalism and not grounded, as it should be, in spiritual understanding.

There is no outer thing, group, institution, organisation or even religion, in our world that can protect against the dissolving qualities of the end times. That is because they are all affected by those qualities. Some more than others but all are affected. Your only recourse is to go within and forge your own link to God, and that is what you are meant to do. You can certainly use outer things for support and guidance if you find that helpful but you should do so with discrimination. You cannot rely on anything external to save you. That doesn't mean you can save yourself but you must go within to find that which can save you.

The Best Legacy

 A friend of mine died recently. He was relatively young and left behind a 16 year old daughter. Fortunately, he was quite well off but it got me thinking about the best legacy you could leave your children. What I came up with is very simple, but the truth is simple, isn't it?

I would leave them a few sentences and this is what I would say. "Love all that is good and true, both in their expression in this world and, above all, in their essential origin. And then know that this origin is in a being. It's not in some abstract ideal but a real divine being which is God. You cannot have good without God, and if you love good you must love God more because he is the source of it."

That's pretty basic, I know, but what more is there really? Everything else comes from that and without that anything else is irrelevant.

Of course, I would add all my worldly goods to avoid disappointment!

World's End

 A few miles from where I live there is a road turning off the main road with, after a couple of hundred yards, a narrow side road leading off the first one. 

If you walk along the side road for 5 minutes or so you come to the gate of what is obviously the entrance to the courtyard of a grand house.

Carrying on past this you see a sign with "World's End' marked in large letters and underneath in red, "Private Road". 

Now, you might stop here and retrace your steps but you decide that the opportunity to see the end of the world is too tempting. Besides, the private bit probably only refers to vehicles not pedestrians, and so you carry on. The road becomes rougher with several potholes marking its surface. There is a thick wood on the left, overgrown and unkempt, while on the right appears a stagnant pond covered in slimy green weed with broken branches sticking out of the water. 

The area now has an aura of abandonment and slight decay. Then you reach an old stone wall about 7 feet high which lines one side of the road. The stones are worn in many places and even falling down in some, and the whole wall is overgrown with ivy and tangled vegetation. 

Then you come to an old wooden door with a rusty lock that looks as if it has not been opened for a long time, but since there only appears to be a dark wood on the other side of the wall why would anyone want to open it? Perhaps at one time it was the entrance to a pleasant grove but that must have been long ago. 

The sense of going back in time becomes stronger but then a few scattered houses appear on the other side of the road though even these are a little odd. Of an indeterminate age, they have the air of being lived in by people wishing to escape the world. You can see various old-fashioned tools stacked up outside, and the front gardens are planted with vegetables rather than flowers. However, there's no sign of any activity.

And then the road stops dead. Thick undergrowth blocks any further progress, even if the path continued which it clearly doesn't. Could this really be the end of the world or, at least, the edge? There seems nothing to do but go back the way you came.

All at once you suddenly notice, hidden away to the far right, a very narrow little gap which turns out to be a path. You could easily have missed it but you take this path wondering where it might lead. What could there be beyond the end of the world? The path is mulchy underfoot with wet leaves littering its floor but then something unexpected. 

An iron fence bars your passage. Now you really can go no further but you peep through the fence to see what's on the other side.

A glorious vista opens up with a wide expanse of grassland on a gently rolling hill bordered by sunlit trees very different in atmosphere to the gloomy wood you have recently passed through. The photo does not do it justice.

Now this is where it gets interesting. For the narrow path you have been on at this point doubles back on itself and leads to a big housing estate. There is a wide road and cars, and the houses are expensive but soulless in the modern way. It's as though you have gone right back into the 21st century after escaping it for a brief moment. What are you to do? You have a choice. The beautiful country lies ahead but it is blocked by iron railings. The path takes you back to the world. It's the obvious way to go but the magic and the mystery of what lay beyond are not there. No, there is only one thing to do. You must climb the fence.

Can you guess what this is about?

The Soul's Origins

 We've long been told, against any common sense observation, that all human races are the same with any perceived differences being merely cultural. This is one of the justifications for the mass immigration inflicted on Western populations over the last two to three decades. However, modern DNA analysis has now shown that ideological fantasy be the nonsense it always was as Europeans and Asians are known to have around 2-4% of DNA from Neanderthals, acquired when Homo Sapiens moved out of Africa some 65,000 years ago and interbred with another species of human already living in Europe. Neanderthals used to be thought oafish brutes, but we now know they were intelligent and had a reasonably developed culture. In fact, their brain volume was slightly larger than ours. At the same time, those humans who remained in Africa bred with earlier species of human and apparently have between 2-19% of their DNA from an archaic 'ghost' population which would likely be a form of Homo Erectus or Home Habilis. Either way a very primitive human that had not make any substantial progress for a million years.

So, no one can rationally claim any more that all human races are genetically identical. That is just untrue and has been proved such, and the differences are more substantial than skin colour which is largely irrelevant.

However, this post is not about human races but human souls. Do they all come from the same place? Are they all, hold your breath, the same? Clearly in one sense they are as they all come from God, but do all the souls that are born on this planet have the same origin before they came here?  A Christian would not normally entertain the possibility that we have an existence before birth or conception if you prefer, but this is a flaw in Christianity and probably responsible for the equality misunderstanding though it also serves to balance out the opposite error, that the differences between high and low overcome their shared humanity.

I believe that several different types of human souls incarnate on planet Earth to further their spiritual evolution. Some come from backgrounds of greater development than others which surely should be obvious. All, however, have to learn the lesson of overcoming the ego and lovingly surrendering their soul to Christ. This planet is a very specialised environment, home to many differing types of soul in a way that other places in the spiritual universe are not. This causes problems but it also provides opportunity.

Assisted Death

 There's a vote in the British parliament today about what they call assisted dying in which a terminally ill person with less than 6 months to live may be put to sleep as we say when we do it to animals. On the face of it, that seems a humane thing to do and I know for a fact that it has long been done anyway as both my grandfather and my uncle were doctors, and both told me it was standard practice in their day, which would have been from the 1920s to the 1980s, to give a dying patient an extra hit of morphine to hurry their passing. This was a decision doctors took on their own without consulting the patient or the patient's family. Imagine that now! But it was regarded as something that would ease suffering when death was inevitable but being dragged out. Of course, these days with modern medicine we can drag it out a lot longer, and maybe that is the problem. A protracted death is actually caused by medical advances.

So, from the purely human point of view it seems the right thing to do to allow people who are obviously dying to choose when they do die. Most of the objections are to do with coercion which clearly is an important issue, but it is not the only one or even, I would say, the main one. Very few people take the reality of God into account. If you believe in God and respect the traditional teachings about the illegitimacy of suicide, that puts everything in a different perspective. Because we live in a world of free will spiritual plans can be disrupted by human intervention but every soul does have a rough plan for its birth, life and death. Rough because it is not fixed in stone and must adapt to the soul's reactions while on this earth, but a general pattern nevertheless. It may be that our experiences at the time of our death form an important part of our experiences in life. In many cases we are thrown back on ourselves then in a way that is not possible at any other stage of life. To seek to prolong life through massive medical intervention may be one sort of wrong approach but to seek to cut it short may be another. Both are attempts to avoid one's destiny or soul purpose.

Having said that, it is hard to reach a conclusion when one is not in the terrible situation some people find themselves in during particularly severe and/or incapacitating illnesses, although even then if you believe in God you might think this is part of a soul's life lessons. Speaking for myself, I am unable to pronounce on the matter. I don't think we have enough information to make a correct decision. It's easy say that it is wrong but it could be countered that God has given us the opportunity to curtail unnecessary suffering at this time precisely because we have reached a point where we can prolong life past its natural point. All I would say is that every person who considers this should also consider the spiritual side of the question. For, when all is said and done, your body belongs ultimately to God and you should respect his will for you.