The End of a World

 Over the last hundred and fifty years, and especially since the end of the Second World War, Western societies have systematically dismantled the protective devices that guarded them from collapse. Standards, rules and cultural norms that prevented them from internal rot and damage from external sources have been attacked, ridiculed, removed and replaced. This is often at the instigation of particular groups which have worked to make the societies more congenial to themselves. It is true that a healthy society would have resisted these groups, but still they are like viruses that can more easily infect a body whose immune system has already been weakened.

The West has been undermined by sentimentality which is a luxury of the comfortable. It is this that has allowed it to admit elements that do it harm. A perfect example is the present crisis of illegal immigration into the UK with many small boats crossing the Channel from France full of people who have no right to be here and can offer nothing to the country into which they come. The solution to this is obvious but it is unacceptable to a sentimentalised society that has never known true suffering or hardship and indulges in the naive fantasy that its present wealth will always, magically, remain at the same level regardless of what happens. It doesn't see that this wealth had to be earned and can be, is being, dissipated.

Without boundaries everything is dragged down to base level. Boundaries guard. They protect. They keep out elements that would destroy what has carefully and laboriously been built up over long periods of time. Once removed the form they have maintained starts to crumble. Form by virtue of what it is needs boundaries, and higher forms, and yes, there are such things as higher forms, need strong boundaries in order to maintain their structure and integrity. Once those go then the structure goes. Again, to take the example of the UK, though this is true in most other Western nations too, we can see how the present relaxation of boundaries is leading to great cultural and material damage. To deny this may have been possible 30 years ago when the process was not so far gone even if it was well underway. It is no longer possible now except to the terminally deluded and those who, for whatever reason, just lie.

It is unlikely there is any solution to this, and it may be that from the spiritual perspective it was inevitable and might even have been desirable. That is because all societies run their course. The West had clearly reached its limits in the 20th century. No more proper art was being created even if, paradoxically, more supposed art than ever before was being turned out, quantity replacing quality in line with the typical pattern of the end of a cycle. But that is just one aspect of the decline which is well documented so there is no need for me to go into all the signs and symptoms here. Suffice it to say that the loss of the sense of transcendence lies at the root of most of them.

If the West has run its course as a creative endeavour that advanced the spirit of humanity then we may lament its passing because of what it was but cannot shed too many tears over it because of what it has become. A dying thing must die. To be a part of the death process is not pleasant but there are lessons that can be learnt by the spiritual aspirant as his world crumbles, primarily detachment and the realisation that everything true and good and beautiful exists in the higher worlds eternally. Anything that sought to manifest those qualities in the material world is only a reflection of higher things and cannot last. That is no reason not to seek to manifest the good in the world because by doing so we build it into ourselves, but equally when destruction comes as it must we must face it with equanimity and the sure knowledge that the forces of entropy can only affect matter. They cannot touch the spirit.

One last point. Jesus said that evil must come into the world but woe to those through whom it comes. If it is part of the divine plan that the West falls, having come to the end of its useful life, that does not mean that those groups which have attacked and undermined it through infecting it with false ideologies are doing God's work. Sickness and death are never good things though they may be necessary things from one perspective. The attack ultimately comes from non-material levels and the forces behind it are seeking spiritual destruction above all. They use vessels in this world that respond to the debased energies they channel. As the West falls how many souls will fall with it because they identify with the corruption? It is one thing not to regret the passing of a society that has fallen from grace but that society is made up of many individuals and these can either be saved or lost as the society of which they are a part collapses. The only solution is to become aware of the decay and stand apart from it.

Humility and Pride

 Look in any spiritual textbook and it will tell you about humility and self-abnegation, particularly if it is a Christian one. Humility is an important virtue that shows one is not dominated by the ego or separate self which is a materialised expression/distortion of the soul. Self-abnegation likewise indicates that the disciple has overcome the ego. But are things really as simple as that? Is humility the only quality the spiritual self should possess?

There are two aspects to the soul which are to do with expansion and contraction, and both must be realised if the soul is to be complete. What, after all, is the point of the soul? What is its purpose? You may say that the soul just is as an individualised expression of divine being which is true enough, but that just refers to its raw state and there must be more or else there would be no need for the soul to descend to the phenomenal world, the subject/object world of duality in which the keywords are experience, expression and experiment. This relates to the self-actualisation of the soul which means its development from a more or less blank cipher to a glorious star being of many colours.

Humility relates to the awareness of the oneness of life and the supreme reality of God, the knowledge that all that you are comes from God. It is not yours. It is his gift to you. But the soul is also called to become great. The soul is not a servant or slave, and any religion that teaches this is not worthy of your spiritual allegiance. The soul has the potential to be a king or queen, and this is the path it must follow. The more you have, the more you can give. The soul should strive to have everything and to be everything. This is its destiny, and this is where pride comes into the the equation.

The spiritual person is proud. He seeks the exaltation of the self. He strives to express the majesty of God in his person. This is right and proper and what we are called to do. We are kings of the universe if only we knew it. We can wield powers that could destroy planets. We can master and direct the pure force of spiritual will.

At the same time, the spiritual person is humble. He knows that everything comes from God. He knows that all he has, others can have too. He is bound to the rest of life with bonds of love. He lives in a permanent state of gratitude to his Creator.

Humility and pride relate to love and will, and the two are not mutually exclusive but part of the whole. Christianity has focussed, to excess some might say, on humility, while the old pagan religions, especially those of the Indo-Europeans, sought the path of the hero. There is no contradiction between these two if one understands that they relate to different aspects of the spiritual path, the push forward of the undeveloped self to mastery and its subsequent return to the inner knowledge of God. The problem has been the expression of humility and pride in the wrong spheres. The spiritual self should have pride and the worldly self humility. Some Christians have made the mistake of transferring humility to the soul and some pagans in the past made the opposite error, but if you understand the nature of the inner and outer aspects to your being you will see that both humility and pride (of the right sort) have their place in the spiritual life.

Love Your Enemies

 As we know, the devil quotes scripture for his own ends. Nowhere has he been busier in this regard over recent years than with the matter of love which is now used as an excuse to overlook all manner of assaults on goodness and truth. Don't judge, don't condemn, be tolerant, accept everyone and (pretty much) everything because, you know, love.

When Jesus told us to love our enemies he meant we should not hold hatred in our hearts for those who do us an ill turn. This is not to benefit our enemies who may or may not be good or bad people. It is to stop the hatred corroding our soul which is what hatred does do when it is personal. He was saying that hatred darkens the heart while love brings light to it. You cannot affect what is out there in others but you can affect what is in yourself. If you want to go to heaven then you must have heaven within you. We need to remember this. After death you will go to a place, an environment, that reflects your inner state. The subjective mind and the objective world reflect each other in the post-mortem state, the spiritual world. If you have hatred within you, you cannot go to a place of love

This is why we are enjoined to take Christ into our hearts. Not merely believe in him, but actually build him into our being. This does start with belief but must progress to a form of identification. That does not mean you are Christ, that is blasphemy, but Christ is in you. Controversially for a Christian, this can work with other deity figures depending on how much spiritual light they carry, but none carries so much light, and pure light unmixed with other stuff as is the case with other deity figures, as Christ who is the image of God in human form to a greater degree than anything or anyone else. God has appeared in many images to humanity at various stages of its existence but only in Christ is he revealed as fully as is possible in this world.

So, love your enemies because love cleanses the soul and hatred makes it sick. But loving your enemies does not mean accepting evil, and if you use the excuse of love to ignore or, worse, justify evil then you are betraying love which, ultimately, is love of the Good.

Today in the name of love what is ugly is called beautiful, what is unnatural is called natural and what denies spirit is regarded as as healthy in its own way as what fully accepts it. If you really love then what you love first and foremost is God who is the author of love, and if you love God then you condemn what rejects or insults God. You don't let that condemnation affect you on a personal level because then it drags you down, but nor do you succumb to the dangerous illusion that universal, unconditional love means loving everything equally. There is good and there is evil. To love your enemy does not mean accepting evil which must be identified and unsentimentally condemned.

Resentment and Nobility

 If I were the devil what sin would I most try to stimulate? What sin would be most spiritually corrupting for those who succumbed to it, and most damaging for the integrity of any culture in which it took hold amongst a sufficient number of the people? 

Resentment is the perfect sin from the demonic point of view because it can be disguised as a virtue, both to the one who holds it and to the society into which it is introduced. One can clearly see how resentment has undermined the Western world and is causing the West to allow itself to be destroyed. It is not only resentment, of course, because there are many factors at play, but this is a prime driver of the spiritually debased condition of our day. 

Resentment is behind the push for equality, and equality is the tool used to bring down the West and all it strove for which was excellence. For equality always does bring down more than it raises up as it inevitably reduces to the lowest common denominator the standards and culture of any society in which its pernicious influence takes hold. No egalitarian culture strives for nobility of soul and that is the preeminent spiritual quest for Western man. The very word nobility is meaningless in the egalitarian world, but if I had to pick one word to describe the goal of the spiritual path that would be it.

What is nobility? It is a spiritual condition of dignity, authority, responsibility, sacrifice and love, though love understood in its fiery rather than watery context. Nobility is the sun shining in solitary splendour in the heavens, the light by which everything else sees and to which everything else aspires. It is the fully realised individual soul that is able to express the power and majesty of God. It is Christ on the cross and Christ resurrected. It is that which stands at the top of the hierarchical ladder and the justification for that ladder which, be it noted, has height but also steps whereby to mount. Climbing is harder than falling and to be noble is harder than to resent but the noble soul knows God whereas the resentful soul has completely lost sight of God. It was resentment that caused Satan's fall and he uses it to bring us down if he can find anything anti-noble in us which he can stimulate. Therefore, cultivate the noble in your heart and shun the petty. That way you will find the path to the true God who loves absolutely but is no egalitarian. He is too big for that.

The Spiritual Failure of Tristan

Tristan & Isolde is a great opera, one of the very greatest. The Act 1 Prelude, Isolde's Narrative and Curse, the Love Duet in Act 2 and the concluding Liebstod in which Isolde sings ecstatically of a transcendent union with Tristan after death are some of the most extraordinary moments in Western music. The impact of this opera was profound on late 19th century consciousness and marked all serious music subsequently. Countless writings testify to its enormous influence, and not just on composers but artists across the creative spectrum.

The music is extraordinary, and yet the message of this opera as it comes through in the libretto is one of spiritual decadence and death. Tristan, originally a solar hero, is undone by infatuation with a woman and consequently becomes a weak, pitiful figure whose inner sense of wholeness and integrity is completely undermined by his obsession. He seeks to shun the day and be absorbed in night, and this represents the overcoming of the spiritual strength of the sun by lunar forces which is essentially the overcoming of spirit by matter. 

That is the very reverse of the true spiritual path, especially the masculine path, in which the self is raised to godlike potency through conscious alignment with divine reality. Instead, Tristan seeks to be merged back into the chaos of pre-creation from whence his soul emerged. Overcome by his sensual passions and losing control of his inner centre, he seeks a return to the emasculating arms of the primeval matriarchy and a pantheistic dissolution instead of following the path of becoming a radiant centre of light himself. 

In this path he could still have loved Isolde but would not have let that love overwhelm his spiritual integrity. He would have been master of it although, in the context of the story, he would not have acted on it since she was betrothed to another man so he not only betrayed his oath of loyalty to the King, as related in King Mark's desolate lament, in my view the spiritual heart of the opera, but he also violated the sanctity of marriage.

This does not form part of Wagner's treatment of the legend but the story serves as an illustration of a test for an initiate (Tristan was a hero so at a high level of spiritual development) which he failed. There is no sense of this in the opera which is a straight paean to romantic love which, although ending in tragedy from the worldly point of view, sees the two protagonists finding their fulfilment in death with the implication they have moved onto a higher plane. But have they really or have they succumbed to idolatry? Real spiritual attainment only comes when the soul turns away from seeking fulfilment in creation, any aspect of creation, even a lover as soulmate, and looks for it in the Creator. Then the soul can turn back to creation and move in its confines without attachment or suffering.

Love is an excuse for anything runs the Romantic creed, a creed we have largely adopted today. But this is an illusion. There is love and then there is love. Jesus said that the greatest love is to lay down one's life for one's friends. Tristan and Isolde lay down their lives but not as acts of personal sacrifice. They are seeking the delights of heaven not renouncing these delights for the love of God. Only those who are prepared to sacrifice heaven for others are worthy to enter it.

There is a close parallel with that other Arthurian story of Lancelot and Guinevere. Here too sexual obsession and infidelity are the cause of spiritual failure and destroy an ideal kingdom. Lancelot was the greatest of knights but he proved unworthy at the final test, and, because he was the greatest, his downfall impacted the whole world in which he lived. Arthur's kingdom was destroyed. But unlike Tristan, Lancelot worked out his fault through renunciation and repentance as he lived the rest of his life as a monk just as Guinevere, his adulterous lover, became a nun in contrition for her part in the sin. Love does not justify everything. At least, what is called love does not do so. There are higher values which even love must obey.

Wagner's words may carry a misleading spiritual message because his metaphysical understanding was limited. He adopted Schopenhauer's misconception of Nirvana as non-being as Tristan's credo, and saw that as the peak of spiritual realisation. However, in Tristan & Isolde his musical understanding and power of expression exceed his intellectual and philosophical grasp as they also did in Parsifal which is a curious and unsatisfactory mish-mash of Christianity and Buddhism from the story point of view but contains music in the Prelude and Good Friday section that is amongst the most spiritually profound of anything heard in this world. Tristan & Isolde also has music that reaches further into the higher planes than practically any other, but one can see why some people have problems with Wagner. The music can seem too intense while the themes of some of his operas, and Tristan especially, do have something spiritually self-indulgent about them. Nonetheless, Wagner was clearly used by the powers that be to bring through something entirely new and open up higher levels of reality to the physical plane. He was certainly not a saint but then how many saints are creative artists of genius?

Good and Bad Seeds

 I have used the analogy of human beings in this world as comparable to seeds planted in the earth before. Given that the same patterns repeat themselves at all levels of creation, the basis of symbolism and a key to deeper understanding, this seems reasonable. We are gods but gods in potential just as seeds are plants but only potentially so. The dark earth is this dark (spiritually considered) Earth, and the light of the sun to which the seeds grow upwards through their equivalent of aspiration is like the light of God to which the human soul should aspire. 

But this comparison contains a warning. Not all seeds germinate. 

I have just looked up the factors that might prevent germination. Here are some.

• • Dormancy:

  Many seeds naturally enter a dormant state to protect themselves from unfavorable conditions like cold, drought, or predation. 

  • Seed Viability:

  Seeds can degrade over time, losing their ability to germinate. Factors like storage conditions, temperature, and humidity can affect seed viability. 

  • Environmental Factors:

  Even viable seeds require specific conditions for germination, including moisture, oxygen, temperature, and sometimes light or dark. Some seeds may not germinate if planted too deep or shallow, or if the soil temperature is not optimal. 

  • Internal Factors:

  Some seeds may have internal factors, such as a thick seed coat or chemical inhibitors, that prevent germination until those factors are overcome. 

  
  

   It is not hard to equate some of these with human barriers to spiritual development. For instance, dormancy. In many people the spiritual sense does lie dormant. The stuff of which they are made is not robust enough to overcome world conditions. In others there can be a degradation of the soul as the lower self allows itself to be caught up in sin. Environmental factors must also be taken into consideration, and internal factors such as the intrinsic quality of the soul in the first place cannot be ignored.

  
  

  However, human beings are different to seeds in that we have free will. We can, if we set our minds to it, overcome obstacles. A particular environment might hinder but it cannot prevent. 

  
  

  A natural question to ask would be what percentage of seeds germinate, and the answer is it depends. It depends on the species, it depends on weather conditions and it depends on the time of planting. Modern science tells us that human beings all belong to the same species, and biologically we may do even if there are different categories within that species. But spiritually we may not. It is an unsubstantiated assumption that because we are all children of God we are all the same sort of children. We might well have different spiritual origins, and even where there is similarity of origin we know that the same parents can have quite different children. The weather conditions relate to the spiritual climate when we are alive. It may be fair as in some periods of history or it may be foul as now though if we are born at a foul time there will be a reason for that. A hardier strain might be produced by inclement weather.

  
  

  Then there is the time of planting. Most traditions would agree that we are not now in spring. Indeed, most would say we are deep in winter. It may be that the harvest is not great at such a time but this analogy should not be pushed too far. If we are alive now it is because the greater difficulties can produce a more intense growing season. What is lost in terms of quantity may be gained qualitatively speaking. The seeds that do sprout might produce a better crop. Those that don't might be held back for another season.

  
  

  There is good seed and bad seed. Both can germinate but the good seed is more likely to do so. What makes a good seed is love of God. This produces the pushing up through the earth towards the light of the sun. A bad seed can be characterised by rejection of God, a very bad seed by hatred of God. It seems that few people today love the Good. The Good is the same as God. God is Being which is a transcendental thing. That means it is beyond this world. If you do not look for the meaning of life beyond this world you are rejecting God and, ipso facto, rejecting the Good. That is why personal goodness, or goodness as the world judges it, is less important than the orientation of the soul. A conventionally good person who does not seek to strive upwards through the earth to the sun is not aware of the true Good and is therefore is on the wrong side when it comes to spiritual good and evil. His seed will not sprout. He may claim to love God but if he gives precedence to any worldly conception of good then his claim is false. He doesn't love God but an imagined idol of his own making.

  
  

  We live in an egalitarian culture which believes everyone will be saved because everyone is basically good. There is no bad seed, all is good. However, egalitarianism is a poisonous doctrine because it sacrifices truth for a perversion of love. Without hierarchy there is no higher or lower, no better or worse, and this means that everything sinks to the same level. The vertical collapses to the horizontal. It is clear that the egalitarian ethos has been put through by the dark forces to shut mankind out from the spiritual heights. It is a justification for resentment, making a vice into a virtue, and a major contributory factor to the degradation of seeds.

  Note: I could have described this in terms of healthy and poor quality seeds to remove the sense of moral judgement. But there is moral judgment involved when you are speaking in human terms. Healthy is good, spiritually speaking.

From Whitefield to Yercaud

During our time in Whitefield Michael, who was a great animal lover, bought a strange looking creature in the Bangalore bazaar. Obviously some sort of primate, this is what it looked like.

I think you'll agree this is not a thing of beauty, but Michael bought it to save it. Despite the Hindu reverence for the cow and the doctrine of ahimsa (non-violence and respect for all living things), Indians do not treat animals particularly well. This one had been captured from a tree and was being used as an object of sport in the bazaar. Michael paid a few rupees to rescue it from its captors, and then decided to keep it as a pet. This was probably unwise as it was a wild animal but it seemed harmless enough. We fed it bits of fruit and rice, and Michael bought an old bird cage to keep it in at night. During the day it ran around the house except when Michael went out to the local shops when he took it with him wrapped round the back of his neck. The sight of an eccentric Englishman bicycling around the village with a furry scarf soon became a source of amusement for the locals, but it was affectionate amusement because Michael was a popular figure there.

This carried on for a while and in that time we learned that Montrose, as Michael called him, was a slender loris which is an arboreal primate that is, as one might have guessed from the eyes, nocturnal. And that became a problem. During the night Montrose would whistle constantly so we let him out to roam around the house. I was having severe doubts about keeping him and wanted to release him back into the wild but Michael had grown attached to him. Then things got worse. Montrose discovered that he was a carnivore. He caught insects and that changed his character. From being quite mild and gentle he became aggressive and would bite. Not me because I was now fed up with him and left him alone but he bit Michael enough to draw blood and shortly afterwards Michael became quite ill. I decided enough was enough and took Montrose into the jungle where I put him in a tree, back where he belonged. Some South African Sai Baba devotees who lived locally showed a forgiving spirit and brought Michael restorative soup to get him back on his feet. I say they were forgiving because I had met one of them a short while before and, not realising he was a devotee, had spoken critically of Sai Baba. When I finished he calmly told me that he was a devotee, a lesson in think before you open your mouth I have subsequently learned.  But, as I said in a previous post, the devotees were all good people even if, in my estimation, they were spiritually naive.

When Michael had recovered we were invited to dinner by an Anglo-Indian ex-army officer who lived in Whitefield with his family. Whitefield had originally been set up as a retirement colony, so-called, for Anglo-Indians who worked on the railways as many of them did in British times. We had first met this person through some rather extraordinary ladies we had known in Bangalore. These were four Parsee sisters, probably in their seventies, who lived in a beautiful but rundown old bungalow in Grant Road near the Bombay Ananda Bhavan, the guesthouse that we had stayed in for several weeks before moving to Whitefield. There was something a bit Miss Havisham-like about these sisters. They were all spinsters, very aristocratic with pale paper thin skin covering boney features. They lived surrounded by the souvenirs of yesteryear with an equally elderly servant looking after them. Their father had been a rich lawyer and probably they had not married because there was no one of their caste and class and religion available in Bangalore. But they were very sweet and kind, and Michael and I were often invited to tea, on one occasion meeting the ex-army officer who now had invited us to his house.

Colonel De Souza turned out to be the solution to our problem about what to do after our attempt to buy a property in Whitefield fell through. He asked us if we had heard of Yercaud, a hill station in Tamil Nadu about 150 miles south of Bangalore. At 5,000 feet of elevation he thought it offered an ideal climate for Europeans and also presented opportunities to run a guesthouse as people went there in the summer to escape the heat of the plains. He knew of it because he had been to school there at Montfort, a Catholic private school, and he gave us the name of a couple of contacts. A week later Michael went off on a reconnaissance trip. I stayed behind in Whitefield because I was helping some visiting Christian missionaries redecorate their little chapel. They had come to our house because we were the only Westerners in Whitefield who were not Sai Baba devotees. They soon realised we were not going to be converted to their brand of Christianity but we remained friendly.

When Michael came back from Yercaud he was full of enthusiasm. He liked the town and its surroundings and had actually found a house to rent. I was happy to go along with this because the time felt right to move on, and Yercaud seemed a good place for us to go, both climate and area wise. We started to make arrangements to pack up and move.

 Before we did move though we had to find someone to take up the lease on the house we had rented for a 6 month period, all paid for in advance. We had only been there for 4 months and assumed the landlord would reimburse us the 2 months outstanding if we found someone to take up the lease. We soon did through the devotees we knew and arranged to meet the landlord with the new tenants to sign the relevant documents. The landlord accepted a cheque from the new people which included payment for the 2 months at the end of our tenancy but then, having given us to understand he would reimburse us those 2 months, declined to do so. The incoming tenants were embarrassed and we were angry but there was nothing to be done. This was not our last bad experience of Indian business practices but there was no use fussing over what could not be changed so a couple of days later we loaded everything we possessed into a small truck and headed south to Yercaud.