Inner Religion

 Many people who think they believe in God actually believe in a projection of their own mind. On the other hand, there are those who do perceive something of the reality of God within themselves and these are the only true believers because they believe in a reality not an idea. Consequently, their approach to the divine will inevitably take on something of a personal nature. It must and, what is more, it should.

Human beings exist on many levels but the great majority are focussed on physical, emotional and mental planes. They are conscious on those planes but not higher ones. A minority, though one that is growing, is awakening to higher levels and these people will often not be satisfied with an outer religion. They will seek to know God for themselves. They may make mistakes in the course of their search, and they may also be condemned by those who feel that all authority must derive from an external body, an official religion, but the law of life is growth and there is only so much spiritual growth you can obtain if you rely on outer things, whatever they are. Christ wanted us to become Christ-like ourselves, and if we talk about Christ being born in us what else can that mean other than we must seek him within? No doubt in the course of that search we will stumble and fall into illusion many times, but this is all part of the growing process. To risk going in the wrong direction is better than never to move.

It is not necessary to reject religion but it is important not to be bound by it. That is especially true for modern people who have evolved a greater sense of individuality. This is in line with God's will for his creation. We cannot become gods ourselves, which is our destiny, if we remain submerged in the group. At the same time, to be an individual in isolation is what caused Lucifer's downfall. We must grow into individuality but we must then grow beyond it, bearing in mind that each new stage includes and contains the previous which is not destroyed but incorporated in the new.

Every follower of a religion must ask himself the question, what is more important, my religion or God? Because they are not the same. Unfortunately, human nature being what it is, the religion that we give ourselves to often ends up possessing us if we are not careful and that is even more problematic now when all religions are husks of their former selves so their spiritual light does not shine directly but, as it were, through reflection. Just as those who feel they have gone beyond the need for a religion and can approach God on their own must be extremely attentive to their thoughts, feelings, motivations, egotistical impulses and prejudices so the religious must carefully discriminate between what in their religion is of God and what is of man. And there is an awful lot of man in every religion.

We follow Christ to become Christ not to remain a follower. That means that at some point on the journey we must take full spiritual responsibility for ourselves. Otherwise we will remain outside the temple. Ultimately, every man must become his own pope. There is no other way.

A Pantomime Church

 The appointment of the new Archbishop of Canterbury is so absurd as to be almost comic.  It must surely be the final nail in the coffin of the Church of England and seems like a deliberate act of self-harm, proving beyond all doubt that this branch of Christianity is only concerned with social justice ideology with any real religion merely a subset of that. Other Christian churches might look on with astonishment but they should consider the degree to which they too are succumbing to the world because they are, only less so. 

But I want to write here about how this is actually a good thing or, at least, can be used to a good end.  All churches are externalisations of the spiritual but the spiritual can only be known inwardly. The external is there merely to point to the inner. It's a support and guide for those whose inner sensibility is not established. The trouble is that support can become a crutch and then it will weaken the connection we should all be developing to God. There are times when we need the support of an external organisation but there are other times when we should be outgrowing that and now is one of those times. The usual excuses are that without an outer authority all sorts of crazy, egotistical, false and deluded notions of the spiritual will arise, reflecting the psychologies and pathologies of those who propagate them. And this is perfectly true. There is plenty of evidence for that throughout the centuries, and certainly from the last several decades. Nonetheless, this is a stage that must be gone through if a true, uncorrupted inner sense of God is to be developed. A child learning to walk will probably fall over a few times, but if he stays on his backside and doesn't stand up by himself he will never walk.

Therefore, use the current state of the churches, taken to its most absurd level in the C of E, a true pioneer in spiritual ignorance, to forge your own connection to God. For Christ is within, not in any organisation or even church. He can use churches and obviously he has done so in the past, but churches only exist to show the way to those who cannot yet find it within themselves. I don't dispute that they provide a structure to belief and a communal space for worship, and I am not saying they should not exist because we need the outer and the inner. Both together make the whole. But in the context of the present time the real need is to go beyond established churches and find God within ourselves. There comes a point at which what once guided becomes an obstacle, and many have reached that point now. The pantomime that is the modern Church of England serves to bring this home with stunning clarity.

How to Respond to Current Events

All those who recognise we are living through an end times scenario have the problem of how to react with regard to the increasingly spiritually debased condition of these times. That includes not just how to face the bad there is but how to deal with the false hopes that are presented as well.

The answer is don't react. We must accept that the end times cannot be resisted. The energy behind them is irreversible and not meant to be reversed. To think it can be arrested is to put matter ahead of spirit. That does not mean we should not try to promote order, beauty and the good while condemning disorder and ugliness. We absolutely should, but our world has entered a state of dissolution and this is a natural process, inevitable in a material world which has its seasons and cycles and in which a fundamental law is entropy, things running down and running out. Entropy can be staved off at certain times but it cannot be wholly reversed and nor should it be because that would be to give matter the same rights as spirit which is a form of blasphemy. 

Therefore we must accept that the nature of these times is towards decadence and loss. That is not to say we allow ourselves to get caught up in that process. Inwardly we must resist but the outer world will go the way it is going. That is written and cannot be altered. Our task is to fortify ourselves on the spiritual level by focusing attention within and becoming detached from material things and the world out there. It is not that we do not care but we do not allow ourselves to get caught up in care and thereby lose our centre in God and our focus on the next world as the true one. What goes on in this world is not our business. Our responsibility is to put ourselves right with God and act as a beacon so that others may be inspired to do the same. We should observe the world and be aware of its deviation from truth but not let that deviation disturb us. That is hard and can seem like indifference but it is a question of balance between love, knowledge of the real and trust in God, all of which must form a part of our approach to these times.

This should lead us to doing the right thing, regardless of any outcome. The result of our actions is not our affair but the thought behind the actions is. We leave the results to God but we act, as much as we can, as his agents in this world so that he has the opportunity to use us in whatever way he sees fit. How that is is not our concern, and the best way we can serve is by attuning ourselves to the divine through love and dedication to the truth. That way the divine can come through us in some small way. We can act as channels through which God expresses himself in this world. The key as always is love but not love as the world understands love. It is love of God and his natural order. This is not a recommendation for turning turn your back on the world or, if it is, then doing so in the right way and for the right reason. Detachment is not disdain. It is simply a matter of putting first things first and then seeing where that leads you. You may act, you may not. That depends on your individual mission. But if you do you will be acting from the right place which is the God-centred soul as opposed to the worldly success seeking self.

The Recent Solar Eclipse

 

This is the chart for the recent solar eclipse on 21st September. That also happened to be my birthday and the eclipse was just a couple of degrees off my natal sun (the eclipse was late in the day and I was born shortly after midnight hence the distance between degrees for the same day). That is significant enough but an additional factor is Saturn directly opposite at 28 degrees of Pisces which is even closer to a direct opposition to my sun at 27 Virgo. So far nothing untoward seems to have happened other than a leak from a pipe in my bathroom that went through the ceiling in the room below and did quite a lot of damage. It was discovered an hour after the eclipse. A leak might involve the water sign of Pisces and also Neptune which is conjunct Saturn here but it does not have any connection with an eclipse. However, it is said that the effects of an eclipse may start several days before it takes place and continue for up to three months afterwards. 

An eclipse on your natal sun is supposed to herald new beginnings and potentially dramatic changes. With Saturn involved there can be increased responsibilities and new limitations as well. This was my 70th birthday so you might say all those factors come into play. But then everyone gets to 70 who lives that long and not everyone has this pattern on their birthday so I doubt that is all there is to it. It will be interesting to see what, if anything, goes on in my life in the next few weeks. The energies involved in astrology, whatever they are, can be processed internally if one is in tune with the cosmos and consciously aware of oneself and one's personal shortcomings. If one is unconscious and, let's face it, we all are to some extent or we wouldn't be here, they can manifest externally in the form of events that occur. I intend to be as aware as possible of my thought processes and emotional reactions in the coming weeks. Perhaps this is a good opportunity for me to watch myself more closely than usual and bring things I should be doing anyway, but often neglect to do, into sharper focus.

When I first saw the conjunction of the eclipse with my sun I felt mildly apprehensive. I've had experiences with eclipses before as mentioned in Meeting the Masters. But then the thought popped into my head. "Don't be like the heathen. Trust in God." I don't normally think in terms of heathens but that was the word as it appeared in my thoughts. I take it to mean that I should not be superstitious because of this or that pattern in the sky. The stars (so-called) do reflect the workings of creation but above them there is the Creator and one should always have confidence that whatever may play out in our lives down here on earth is always for our spiritual good. The planets are like the gods but the gods are the servants of God who is beyond them all.

Settling in Yercaud

It was now December of 1980. After 8 months in India Michael Lord and I had finally found somewhere we could run as a guesthouse which was our purpose for being in India. Or at least it was the way we intended to make ends meet. Our primary motivation was to lead a contemplative life for which at the time India was still more conducive than the West. And then, as we found out later, the Masters had taken us away from England because of the great cultural changes that were about to take place there and throughout the Western world in the 1980s. In the '60s there had been the feeling in many quarters that a new stage of consciousness was about to unfold. On the popular level this translated into the beliefs and practices associated with the so-called New Age movement, but everywhere there was something in the air, a sense that the old ways were passing and new, supposedly more enlightened, ways would arise to replace them. However confused, misunderstood, trivialised and, in many ways, ignorant this feeling was, it existed.

But every action sets up its own reaction. The world was not about to become more spiritual as many naively hoped. It was going to get even more materialistic. The positive energy of the time was captured and rerouted. In the UK the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher arose to deal with the excesses of socialism but the cure to that ill was equally detrimental to the spiritual health of the nation. I am not some rabid anti-Thatcherite because I believe in a free market and it is obvious that her brand of politics came about in response to the greed and corruption of the left, but it brought with it a materialism and corrupt capitalism of its own. From a societal point of view, it was every man for himself. The moral fibre of the country, already in freefall, took a dive. In different ways and to different degrees this happened all over the West. Living in India in the 1980s I didn't see it as it was going on. I had very little contact with Western media and wasn't particularly interested. But on my return I could see the changes that had occurred. The descent into deeper materialism, now unchecked by the vestiges of a religious sensibility, the vulgarity, the coarseness. This wasn't just caused by the new form of right wing politics because the reaction of the left to those politics caused as much if not more spiritual degradation. In different but complementary ways each side did its own damage, and we are living with the results of that today. 

One could point to many other periods recently when things took a turn for the worse. Again in the UK which is what I know best, the election of Tony Blair (the abbreviation of the Christian name reeking of fake egalitarianism) was another and sharper arrow in the spiritual heart of the nation. But from the perspective of someone just setting out on the spiritual path as I was in the early 1980s it was better that I was removed from the increasingly materialistic atmosphere of the time until I more firmly grounded and better able to withstand it. We are all affected by our environment and adopt its behavioural patterns to an extent. A sapling often needs protective fencing around it while it is in early stages of growth if it is in an unfavourable environment. India was my fencing then though not because it was a particularly spiritual place. It wasn't but it did still value the spiritual and hadn't totally succumbed to materialism. I doubt you could say that now.

The property Michael had bought was on a hillside about a quarter of a mile from the town. It spread over three levels or terraces. Just to the right of the entrance on the lowest level there was the well which was necessary as there was no mains water in the town at that time. 

The well and lower bungalow

All larger properties had their own well and Yercaud itself had a big well in the centre with a few smaller ones here and there. Water was not usually a problem as long as one was sensible except in the summer when several wells would go dry. Ours only dried up once during a particularly hot summer when we had guests in the bungalow who insisted on washing their clothes every day and using a lot of water to do so. We asked them not to but they carried on. They also smuggled in over a dozen people to a bungalow that had three double bedrooms and was priced accordingly. When challenged they insisted that there were only 6 adults, the rest were servants and children who didn't count because they slept on the floor. We had to ask them to leave and as the head of this family was the police chief from Salem things could have got awkward, but since the well was about to run dry he was ready to leave anyway so there were no repercussions which, given how power operates in India, there might well have been. 

The entrance to the property with a wooden gate and one of the two side pillars we added

The stairs leading to the main bungalow on the top level

The bungalow we ran as a guesthouse was on the same level as the well. It had a verandah that ran along two sides of the house, a large central area with a high ceiling for coolness and three bedrooms. There were bathroom areas rather than fitted bathrooms meaning there was just a lavatory, a tap and a space to pour water over yourself with a six inch high ridge around it to stop the water sloshing everywhere. The water ran out through a hole in the wall that led to an external open drain. The idea was that the water would evaporate in the sun which is what generally happened. The drain ran for a few yards and then stopped so any residual water would just seep into the ground. Initially there were no lavatories in this lower bungalow so we had to install a couple and put a septic tank in to deal with the waste. After a few years this tank had to be emptied and believe it or not there was a man who climbed in and did the job by hand. He was a very jovial fellow. I suppose if you do a job like that you have to be able to look on the bright side. If you work in an office and are bored by your 9-5 existence always remember, it could be worse.

The lower bungalow from the road

The entrance to the lower bungalow with a mulberry tree

The lower bungalow viewed from the level above with a large poinsettia bush

We had bought the property from a lawyer who administered it on behalf of the estate of the previous owners. These had been a couple of English spinsters who had died a few years before. They were daughters of a missionary and had lived their entire lives in India. It must have been a lonely existence after most of their compatriots had gone back to the UK but they knew nothing else. Neither of them had ever left India so it was their country though I imagine they had always been outsiders and their isolation seems to have made them increasingly eccentric. Apparently they would take books out of the local library and cut out pages which contained anything of a remotely sexual nature. As this library was housed in a club which had been the social centre for the British coffee planters, most of whom had left by the mid '50s after which no new books were bought, the controversial elements would have been innocent by today's standards. I was actually grateful for this library because the lack of up to date books meant I read a lot of 19th century literature that I never would have done otherwise. These books were the only form of entertainment and information I had for nearly 5 years. I read modern works before and I have done afterwards, though practically no fiction, but I do think those years of only reading books written in a less spiritually corrupt age served me well.

We lived in the bungalow on the upper terrace. Behind this the hill extended further for several hundred yards where it was a kind of scrub jungle. At the back of the house the hill had been cut away to leave a natural wall about 12 feet high and this had grown over with various plants including morning glory and wild pomegranate. The kitchen looked out onto this wall and instead of a solid door just had a wooden frame about 5 feet wide by 6 feet high lined with a wire grill. We usually left this open during the day for air and light and this was responsible for a little adventure I had. I was cooking lunch around midday when I heard a commotion coming from the wall behind the house. Then there was a crash and a lot of vegetation tumbled into the kitchen. This was immediately followed by the cause of the commotion. A python around 10 feet long whose momentum carried him up right up to my feet. He looked at me and I looked at him and then we both turned round and shot off in opposite directions, me into the house and him out of it. But after the initial shock I turned back and followed him. It's not every day you get a 10 foot python in your kitchen. He was going down the waste water gulley at the back and going so fast that he disappeared into the jungle before I could catch up with him which was probably just as well. I wrote about this encounter more extensively a few years ago. https://meetingthemasters.blogspot.com/2018/06/my-snake-stories.html

The Sun and the Planets

 Nietzsche criticised Christianity as a slave religion which sapped the strength of the masculine virtues as a result of its encouragement of humility and self-abnegation. He said it encouraged weakness and condemned its suppression of natural instincts. For him the Christian runs away from life instead of whole-heartedly embracing it. 

It cannot be denied that there is this element in Christianity (though not in Christ) and it is one of the reasons many people these days turn to some form of paganism as a more robust and less vitality draining spiritual approach. There is also an ethnocentric aspect to this in that many Europeans do not wish to adopt what they see as a foreign, specifically, a Jewish, religion. The pagan traditions are regarded as purer and more in keeping with racial identity.

But is Christianity as we know it in the West a Jewish religion or is it really a European one? Although Christ was born a Jew (or half Jewish if you believe the Gospel account of his paternity), the teaching he brought completely overturned the Jewish religion of the time. That is, after all, why he was crucified by the religious authorities or at their behest. That teaching was then absorbed by Europeans and interpreted in the light of their own identity and within the context of their own traditions, Greek philosophy, Roman law and the Germanic/Nordic sense of individuality and freedom to name the three most important. Christ had to have some particular form and he had a Jewish form because the Jews of the time had been prepared by God as a receptacle for his advent, but in himself he is universal and when the religion founded in his name came to Europe it became completely European.

In fact, it was only much later when the traditional European societal structures were undermined and hierarchies destroyed that the enfeebling qualities of Christianity were brought out. Tell the Desert Fathers they had a slave religion, tell St Benedict, St Columba, St Francis and a host of others. Tell the Crusaders or more or less anyone up to the 18th century. It was only when Europe abandoned its traditions and Christianity descended into humanitarianism that it became feminised and lost its spiritual vigour and vitality. Certainly, it was a monastic religion and a priestly religion and suffered much in the way of corruption (though no more than any other religion and a lot less than most), but it was never life-denying even if it did prize celibacy for some and chastity for all. So did many other religions. If you are trying to transcend the pull of this world and the lure of matter you have to take certain steps. It is not denying nature to realise that the sexual instinct needs controlling. On one level spirit and nature truly are at war even if on another level they can be reconciled.

I mention the attraction of paganism for many people these days and that it is seen as a more natural and affirmative spiritual approach for the European mindset than Semitic (so called, it's not really) Christianity. I love many of the pagan traditions, Egyptian, Greek, Celtic, Norse. Many pagan philosophies are replete with wisdom and insight, the Neoplatonic for instance, or the Indian. In my more fanciful moments I speculate that I may have followed some of these paths in previous lives. But there is a problem. All of them have something essential missing. Before Christ it was not known what that was. After him it became obvious what it was. They were stories without the main character, circles with a missing centre. It's no accident that the principal pagan deities are associated with planets* and that behind them there is often envisaged a hidden One. They are satellites to the central sun who is Christ. Before Christ paganism was a valid spiritual path if it worshipped the One Creator God behind all the gods but with him what was hidden became revealed and the old religions were superseded. Things being what they are there were some aspects of Christianity that were lesser expressions of truth than had existed in paganism even if as a whole it went deeper into the heart of truth and goodness and holiness than paganism ever did or could. And as Christianity lost its force, the further it removed itself from the spirit of Christ, these shortcomings became more apparent. But no pagan god can approach Christ in terms of spiritual power or divine radiance, and the way many contemporary pagans look on their gods today is as bathed in his light. Just like the planets and the Sun. The revived pagan gods have taken on aspects they never had because of Christ, but Christ is the source and to the extent they have any true spiritual substance they are just reflecting him.

Christianity is not a Jewish religion. It was specifically rejected by the Jews. It is not a weak religion for resentful slaves simply because it advocates spiritual power over worldly. Christ may have been a servant in this world in order to teach humility which is the overcoming of the ego, but in heaven he is the great solar hero and a King.

*Note: I realise  that pagans did have deities associated with the sun but they had to have something along those lines, the sun being of such obvious importance. But these were not ruler deities so I see them more as placeholders until the real thing manifested itself in Christ.

Recent Events

 The events of recent days in America seem to me to be significant. A frontier has been crossed with the sacrifice of a young white girl by a brutal savage caught on camera and then the murder of someone whose chief fault in the eyes of his enemies was that he was a believing Christian. It is easy to write these off as terrible but not that unusual killings given more relevance by the fact that the media, mainstream and social, uses them to promote its own ends. There is certainly an element of that and we must avoid being influenced and manipulated to go in this or that direction by unholy powers with their own agendas. 

But there is more because these two events are deeply symbolic of where we are today. First in America but really all over the West. Beauty and innocence murdered by evil and goodness destroyed by hatred. That is what we are up against and it may be that fewer people will now be able to look the other way and pretend that all is more or less ok in the world. We are in the middle of a battle between good and evil. It is a spiritual battle so not all external events will fall neatly into place on one side or the other in the way these seem to do. In a sense the individuals concerned in these two cases are not important. This goes beyond them to what they can be taken as representative of. Things truly are coming to a head. It is essential to avoid being carried away by an emotional reaction because the devil knows very well how to take advantage of that and channel the unbalanced feelings brought out, even if justifiably, into his own work. But we need to feel a cold determination in the face of attack to do what we can to further the work of God and continue to maintain the truth in a world that has abandoned it.

Added note: There are several articles online claiming that both these events were stage managed and either didn't take place or not in the way presented. Frankly I doubt it but similar things have happened before and there is definitely an interest in stirring up anger and hatred and dividing people further, possibly with the intention of provoking a civil war. I am sure there is no depth to which the powers that be will not sink. But still, whatever the truth of the matter it is important not to allow oneself to be stampeded into reaction. Observe, be aware but maintain a level of detachment which is not to say don't allow yourself to feel only that there is a balance to be struck. That is the way to go. God has his own agenda. Try to put yourself in harmony with that.