Books from Blogs

 Now and again I like to put out a reminder of a couple of books not mentioned in the sidebar on the right for lack of room and also because they are compilations of blog posts rather than original books. One is of posts from this blog up to about 2020 while the other derives from Bruce Charlton's Albion Awakening blog to which John Fitzgerald and I contributed. Bruce wrote the foreword to the Albion Awakening book but didn't include any of his posts because, in his words, "I used the blog rather like a notebook, and produced something like a stream of consciousness of ideas relating to the main theme. Consequently, my posts were of essentially ephemeral interest, and we decided not to include them here." I wouldn't agree that his posts were only of ephemeral interest, but the book runs to nearly 350 pages just with my and John's efforts so perhaps his decision was the right one. His posts are all still available anyway.

Here is a list of the contents of the two books which have a wide variety of topics and are, I believe, still both relevant though the last 5 years appear to have deepened the spiritual crisis and plunged Albion still further into dormancy. Perhaps we have to fall further before we can rise. 

From Albion Awakening we have, grouped according to theme:

Prophecies and Prophets of Albion

The Destiny of Britain

An Ancient Prophecy of England

William Blake

Auguries of Innocence

Dion Fortune and Glastonbury

The Magical Battle of Britain

England’s Dreaming

The Jerusalem Suite

Taliesin – Bard of Britain

Journey to the Centre of the Earth

G Wilson Knight

The Inklings

The Eighth Narnia Book

Saints and Sages of Albion

Joseph of Arimathea

William of Glasshampton

The Betrayal of the Romanovs

King Charles the Martyr

King Harold Godwinson

Roger Lancelyn Green Kathleen Raine   Colin Wilson   St Cuthbert   St Dunstan   Two Modern Saints   Is Albion an Angel?       The Land of Albion   The Old Country   Beachy Head and Albion   The British Myth   Albion Set Apart   Pilgrimage   Doorways to Albion   Christian Albion   Iona   Maumbury Rings   The Long Man of Wilmington   London   The Strange Ship   The Last of Logres   The Advent of Arthur   This Charged Land    Albion and Russia   Dwellers on the Threshold   Voyage to the West        The Decline, Fall & Possible Rise of Albion   The Vacuum of Leadership   The Glorious ‘50s   A Deeper Reality    The Old Port    Come and See   Another Chance? England Led the World into Materialism Empire and Albion Albion Still Asleep Albion Besieged What are the Signs of Decline? Deviations of Modernity Brexit Brexit and Religion Those Whom the Gods Would Destroy   Awakening Albion Awakening from Illusion True Awakening Demands Deep Penitence Inconsistency and Confusion Fantasy and Reality Intellect and Intuition Mere Christians Nationalism and Patriotism Women Readers An English Virtue Where We Are Now The Robin Hood Option Redditor Lucis Aeternae The Great Return Beyond the Grey Havens The Return of Constantine The Sleeping King When Britain Fell

From The Spiritual Crisis of Modern Man we have, also grouped thematically:

God

Do You Need God to be Good?

Mysticism, Monism, Theism

God is Love and Love is God

God and Nothing

Belief in God is a Moral Matter

Philosophical Speculation

Atheism

Who Designed the Designer?

Why Believe in God if You Are Good?

Truth

Are We Intrinsically Good or Fallen?

Education and Truth

Psychologising the Spiritual

Persons or Principles

The Difference Between Psychic and Spiritual

False Prophets

First Principles

Metaphysical Error and Heresy

Truth and Ideology

Closed to the Transcendent Christ The Nativity Christmas Thoughts Christianity and Mystery Things Jesus Didn’t Say The Resurrection Mock Christianity Spiritual Transformation Paganism Christianised Jesus Christ and the Mysteries The Return of the Gods What Seek Ye?   Buddhism Beyond Oneness Mindfulness Question Jesus Wept Three in One Are You Real? Then God Is   Non-Duality Advaita and Christianity The Incompatibility of Advaita and Christianity The Temptation of Non-Duality Nothing to Attain Nothing Beyond The Marriage of Being and Becoming Negative Theology   Love Love Without Wisdom Love of Humanity Love and Law Justice and Mercy Morality The Quest for Moral Purity The Archbishop and Homosexuality Morality and the Left Sexual Morality   The Masters What are Masters? Further Thoughts on the Masters The Liberated Soul After Death Are the Masters Demons? More on the Masters Some Reflections on the Masters Meeting a Master   Evil Free Will and Evil The Persecution of the Innocents Demons Why Does God Allow It? Spirituality and Evil Evil and how It Operates   The Spiritual Path & Spiritual Practice A Question on Spiritual Practice Is Mystical Experience the Final Goal? Grace Is Meditation a Good Thing? Being Alone What is a Spiritual Person? Western Hindus How Do You Know? The Radical Evolutionist New Age Spirituality Mysticism, True and False The Mind is its Own Place   Masculine and Feminine Women Priests Feminism Reappraised The Divine Feminine Male/Female Complementarity Feminism and Power Can a Feminist be a Lady? The Divine Androgyne Some Questions on Homosexuality   Modern Times The Spiritual Corruption of the Elite Perception Politics Don’t You Want to Live in an Equal Society? Is Racism a Leftist Invention? Pollution The Age of Aquarius Albion Set Apart The Fall and the Rise Technological Gain Equals Spiritual Loss At the Crossroads Spirituality and the World Mass Immigration Mass Immigration and Christianity Why Leftism is Spiritual Poison Disintegration or Salvation Environmentalism The End of a World

Some Tibetan Deity Pictures

 When I was in India in the 1980s I met a group of Tibetan refugees who had come to the hill station where I lived to to sell some of their wares which mostly consisted of woollen items for which there wasn't much call in the south of India, even up in the hills. But they also had some pictures of Tibetan deities which were block printed on rice paper, and I bought five of these. The pictures were simple line drawings and I passed a few evenings colouring them in with watercolours which is the sort of thing you do when you live in a place with no TV and have to make your own entertainment. 

I found these pictures which I'd forgotten all about at the bottom of a drawer the other day, and so thought I might put them up here. 

This is Manjushri holding the sword that cuts away ignorance. He is associated with prajna or transcendent wisdom. His lion, which symbolises the mind he has tamed, is normally painted blue so I hope he'll forgive my ignorance.

This is the historical Buddha called Siddhartha or Sakyamuni meaning the sage of the Shakyas which was his clan in the India/Nepal border area.

I'm not sure who this is. It could be Tara, a female Buddha, or else a dakini which is a kind of divine sky nymph.

This could be the deity called Marici, the goddess of the dawn.

This one could be Namgyalma who is a deity for long life and healing.

Probably the two most important figures in Tibetan Buddhism, other than historical gurus, are Avalokiteshvara who is the Bodhisattva of Compassion, and Maitreya who is the future Buddha. I didn't have pictures of them so here they are to show how it should be done.

Fear of the Dark

Few of us know real darkness nowadays. Unless you live deep in the countryside you will be probably have some buildings nearby that keep their outside lights on all night. Business premises have been like this for some time but now many private properties do it as well, presumably for security reasons. I remember as a child waking up in the night and not being able to see my hand in front of my face. There's no chance of that where I live today as there's always some light coming in through the curtains, some from lights on a neighbouring property but also a great deal from the night sky itself which reflects back light from the earth, from street lights and lights left on all night on the exteriors of buildings, both private and commercial.

It's insane. We evolved to need darkness to have proper sleep. Without darkness our sleep is more easily disturbed and more likely to be shallow, and this means our waking life will be lived more on the surface too because our minds have not engaged with deeper levels at night. The constant noise we put up with is a contributing factor to that as well, but the lack of darkness in our lives means we live in an increasingly artificial state. Darkness helps us to go inwards. It takes us away from the distractions of life and the excessive stimulation of the modern world. Too much stimulation makes us live on edge, on the outside of things, caught up in the endless movement of material life, and unable to find true rest and restoration which can only be known in stillness and silence, and in the deep darkness that is conducive to peace. Darkness is a friend we no longer wish to know.

We can do this because of electricity. It's no coincidence that the discovery and exploitation of electricity has accompanied the rise and growth of materialism. The two are clearly linked and not just because electricity has powered the modern world. If we ask where electricity comes from we find that it has its origin in the world of sub-nature, and what comes from that world partakes of that world and carries the influence of that world. Jeremy Naydler wrote an interesting book about the prehistory of the computer called In the Shadow of the Machine in which he examines this question of electricity. He concludes with Rudolf Steiner that it is a form of degraded light which might mimic light but lacks its spiritual qualities because it comes from what we might justifiably call the nether regions. Our reliance on electricity and addiction to its use will affect our consciousness which will also become, has become, degraded and desensitised. This is because what we use imparts its qualities to our minds. We enter its world and become part of that world. Our injudicious and excessive use of electricity is taking us out of the world of nature, never mind the spiritual world, and into the underworld which is where electricity comes from.

This is obviously all part of the end times scenario and we can't escape it unless we trek off into the wilderness which is not feasible for most of us and may have its own problems for souls who have elected to live now. What we can do is become aware of the problem. We may have to use electricity to live in the world of the present time but we can be sparing in our use of it, and not allow ourselves to become caught up in the products it powers which will inevitably have a despiritualising effect on us. Electricity is not just material as opposed to spiritual. It derives from a place below the natural world which is our proper earthly home. Who does not feel a greater sense of emotional well-being in a room lit by candlelight or even gas than one with electric light? We may have found a great source of energy but it demands something of us and what it demands is of a spiritual nature.

Symbolically, darkness is ignorance and death, and light is knowledge and life. But there is also good darkness and bad light and we must know the difference.

Christianity and Paganism

 There are two sorts of Christians. Those who completely reject paganism and those who retain some admiration and even love for it. There are those for whom pagans are either primitives or demon worshippers, and then there are those who see Christ as the fulfilment of the best of pagan vision and who adopt Christianity as the seal and consummation of paganism.  I am of the second sort.

Obviously, many pagan beliefs and practices were primitive and many were derived from demon worship, but not all by any means. Paganism was how God or, more usually, his lieutenants, the gods, spoke to humanity in times past. While there is no doubt that paganism has been superseded by the advent of Christ, this is more in the nature of a religious upgrade than an outright replacement meaning that the virtues of paganism were real virtues not vices all along. Insofar as pagans believed in one supreme principle and an order to creation, in that they acknowledged higher worlds and even had means to interact with those worlds, they followed a true and good religion. It may have been limited but it was not entirely false in the context of its time and place.

Christians sometimes put all pagans in the same bracket but that is a mistake. There is nature worship paganism and then there is that of the philosophers. Certainly, there is cross over between the two but they are very different. Leaving the philosophers aside, who anyway are often accepted as proto-Christians and who even influenced Christian theology, there is still some spiritual goodness to be gained from paganism as long as we baptise it. One of the reasons the stories of C.S. Lewis and Tolkien are so loved is that they did precisely this. Lewis overtly, Tolkien more discreetly, but both of them reintroduced pagan elements to a basically Christian world and in so doing brought something back to a Christianity that had not just lost touch with the supernatural but also reduced creation to a dead thing. Paganism regards creation as holy. This is often confused with pantheism, and can descend into that, but really it is the understanding that God has not departed from this world to a far off place we may or may not access when we are dead. He is ever-present, either directly or through his agents. Every tree, every stream, every mountain contains divine life, and paganism knows this while Christianity has largely forgotten it.

Various elements go to make up pagan religion, some bad but some good and the best of them show an understanding of the spiritual world, respect for the Creator and knowledge of his ways. The Celtic saints were Christians, but many of them retained aspects of their pagan beliefs while submitting these to Christian rule. Their pagan derived love of creation is the reason we find them so appealing today.

Having made these points, I should add a proviso. Paganism is of the past and cannot be revived other than in an artificial form. We are modern people with a modern consciousness and sensibility. Our world is not the pagan world and we have come too far ever to make it so. We can be inspired by the past but we cannot go back to it, and the attempt to do so will only result in pretence and a disconnect between head and heart. In these end times all manner of past beliefs rise up to the surface but they do so in a form largely drained of spiritual vitality. That is true of paganism and, in fact, it is becoming true of official Christianity too which is why the contemporary disciple usually has to make his own way in the spiritual world. While making that way he is at liberty to be inspired by the pagan love for and knowledge of the energies of creation so long as he understands these to be subordinate to the Creator who sent his Son to the world to reveal his true face and form.

We Cannot Get to There From Here

 When people take seriously the condemnations of the modern world, its various ideologies, its materialism, its addiction to technology and all the rest, they might ask, what do we need to do? How can we get back on a proper spiritual track? The answer is simple. On an individual level, this is possible and a return to first principles with the appropriate beliefs and practices will help to realign the soul with reality. For, make no mistake, the vast majority of human beings today are completely divorced from reality and living in a degraded fantasy world 

And that is why that on a societal level it is no longer possible to get back on track and has not been for some time. Things are just too far gone. As a culture we cannot get to where we should be from where we are now. When something has grown and become established to the degree that modernity has, it cannot be put right. It can only be completely uprooted and then we must start again from scratch, or if not scratch then something not far off. 

This became even more obvious to me than it already was during the course of writing my recent book on the end times. When I examined certain modern ideologies, it was clear that these were too entrenched in the contemporary mind to be dealt with effectively. The mind will have to receive a great shock to exorcise these thought forms which have sunk so deeply into consciousness that they cannot be erased without a massive upheaval. Even when many people turn to spirituality, they take these ideas with them, and see spirituality through the prism of modernity and its ideological assumptions. This is the legacy of centuries of actual or effective materialism, coupled with the degradation of consciousness that occurs in the end times.

No new political movement can save us. Not even a revival of religion could do that. Such things might correct some of the more extreme forms of crazy thought and behaviour, but they cannot at this stage address fundamental problems, other than superficially. 

This presents a dilemma. Does recognising the reality that real change is no longer possible mean we do nothing or should we at least try to do something while understanding that can never really succeed, though it might make some improvements here and there? Everybody must make his or her own mind up on that score. There is no ready-made answer. The basics of life are simple and will come naturally into view when we are faithful to first principles, the chief of which is to love or, at least, acknowledge God and respect his order, both natural and spiritual. If we get that right everything else will fall into place. If we fail in that then nothing will ever be right. It's like trying to keep the outside of the circle in place when you have lost touch with the centre.

I have sometimes been asked in response to a criticism of the modern world, "Well, what would you do to make things better?" All I can do is point out that this is an impossible question to answer. When the rot has set in so deeply there is nothing you can do. You can't say you should revive Christianity or bring back paganism or abolish communism or democracy or feminism or whatever it might be. In the case of the former, their time of spiritual effectiveness on the societal level has passed. In the case of the latter, they are indelible parts of the modern psyche. We cannot return to where we were and any attempt to do so would fail. All we can do is get our individual houses in order and wait for whatever is coming to clean up the mess. Or, as Jesus said, watch and pray.

This is not a counsel of despair but one of promise. This world was never meant to be the main focus of our lives, meaning our lives in the whole. Eventually, this world will be redeemed and raised up into spirit. The whole of matter will be transformed as Jesus's body was at the Ascension. But that is a long way off. For the time being, the world serves mostly as a training ground for the soul, and one of its functions is as a platform to push against in the search for spirit. Therefore, the fact of its imminent large-scale purification is something to look on with hope. Destruction on one level will lead to resurrection on another. When the degraded environment and corrupted human consciousness are purified by what is to come then a new humanity can arise, cleansed of the dirt it has accumulated over the last several centuries, if not millennia.

The Living Image of the Eternal

Truth is beyond form and expression but for religion to be comprehensible it must be grounded in form. Religious forms can take many varieties which approximate to that which they are trying to express to a greater or lesser degree. Some forms capture something of the reality behind them while others distort it, sometimes unacceptably so. The question then arises. What is the best form, the one that comes nearest to revealing the truth that lies behind all genuine religion?

Before answering that, we must accept that different forms suit different people. That is to say, people of different temperaments and from different cultural backgrounds. It would be unrealistic to think that the whole world should follow one particular form any more than that they should speak one language, and it is probably not a good idea either as different forms can express different aspects of truth. None express the whole, even all together can't express more than a tiny fraction of the whole, but they can complement each other by their particular focal points. This may not be necessary from the purely spiritual perspective, but it can be helpful.

No doubt everyone thinks his own religion is best, and it may be for him. On the other hand, it may not. It may simply be a religion one is born into or one that suits one's strengths or weaknesses or prejudices or preconceptions. Over the course of my spiritual life (pompous phrase, but it can't be helped in this context), which is now some 47 years, I have investigated many, I am tempted to say most, spiritual paths. Not as a follower but by reading about them and exploring their forms and practices. It's fascinating to see how human beings have approached the numinous. So many similarities and so many differences. While recognising the validity of many, I have my favourites but there are also some I think are inspired from lower levels, either originally or through infiltration over the years. Some are even a mix of the true and the false. Quite a few are, in fact.

However, there is one clear winner, (I know it's not a competition, but in a way, it is). Obviously, that is Christianity and not so much because of the religion or religions that have arisen in Christ's name but because of him. Christ is the face and form of God, God revealed in a human being, God embodied. And, while we're at it, let us point out that the image of God himself is another form that encapsulates hidden truth. As God the Father, Creator of Heaven and Earth, this image draws the mind and heart up to the realm of pure spiritual light in a way that lesser images do not. The very word 'God' brings together amorphous ideas and feelings and intuitions in the human head and heart, and moulds them into something tangible, something that the mind can latch onto, to which it can respond and with which it can engage.

Jesus Christ is the perfect spiritual form, the one above all others. First of all, because he is a living person, and spiritual reality is personal before it is impersonal - the opposite to what the sophisticated believe. And secondly, because he is the only spiritual figure totally without flaw, without sin as it is said. He reflects the spiritual world without any corrupt influence of this world. You can say that about no one and nothing else. Certainly, there are many other inspiring spiritual figures and philosophies from before the time of Christ and after him. But he is without peer and incomparable in his truthfulness. I do not doubt that non-Christian spiritual approaches can bring their followers to God, and, for that matter, many ostensible Christian ones might fail in that, but Christ is and remains the Way,  the Truth and the Life. He is the revelation of what this excellent essay calls the single, supreme, eternal creator deity or first principle, born into the Jewish race but come for all people.

There is No Hope in This World

 There is no time more spiritually perilous than when you get what you want. In bad times you can more easily turn to God as the world is not offering you anything, but when the world does offer you something, whether that be money, fame, power or even the kind of political success that you believe will make the world a better place, then you need to watch out.

Religion exists to point us to the spiritual. The spiritual, by definition, is not the material even if you say that ultimately all is one. Ultimately, all is one, no doubt, but there is nothing ultimate about our life in a body in this world. Here, there very definitely is a split between the spiritual and the material. We have both within us, and when I say within I do mean that because thought, in the normal sense, is material even if it only exists because of the spiritual. It is possible because we are spiritual beings but in itself it is based on material processes and is incapable of discerning spiritual reality so it belongs to the material world. Thus, we have both the spiritual and the material within us but we are called to overcome the material and submit it to the spiritual, which means the spiritual on its own terms not as it may be viewed or interpreted by the material component of our being.

All true spiritual teachings tell us to renounce this world. Heaven is not here and is not meant to be here so political triumphs will never bring it about. Wasn't that Judas Iscariot's mistake? He thought Jesus was here to defeat the Romans and restore a Jewish kingdom in this world, but Jesus said that his followers would be hated by the world. He didn't say they would be hated by this world or that world but by the world meaning any kind of worldly society. That is because those that follow Jesus see that nothing in this world can lead to eternal life. The very nature of the world is against that, despite its many beauties.

To say there is no hope in this world does not mean there is no hope. In fact, it means just the opposite. There is great hope, wonderful cause for hope, but it is in heaven not here. If you get what you want you can become satisfied or content, but that means that your motivation for finding the true path to heaven is weakened. 

So, when things seem to be going your way, be careful. It is hard for the rich to get to heaven, and riches are not just monetary.