Truth and Madness

In today's topsy-turvy world anyone who speaks the truth risks being condemned as a bad person. By the same token, a clever, fluent liar can be praised and rewarded. 

It's often hard to tell if a person is mad or bad. Certainly, the present time is largely insane. The denial of God is the denial of truth at the most fundamental level and from that denial come many bad things as must be the case since, if your first principles are evil, what results from them will inevitably be so too.

If you give yourself over to falsehood is that just because you have made an honest mistake as you lack sufficient information to make the right choice? Or is there something in you which is directing you away from truth for its own ends? Something that makes you believe what it wants you to believe? That would be the prideful ego which wants complete autonomy. It believes what sustains and reinforces its own reality and agenda, regardless of truth which is not its primary concern.

In this sense, madness and badness go together. I'm not taking about genuine mental illness here but about the mind's ability to pervert reality for its own sinful purposes, often to do with pride. Sin then leads to insanity and this is the state of the world today.  

Political correctness, which is the modern secular substitute for religion, is a form of soft fascism which attempts to control thought. To go along with it is not simple good manners, as is often claimed, but submission to totalitarian authoritarianism. This is certainly not a reason ever to be offensive. But you need to retain your freedom of intellect and will or else you will be dominated by a false god who seeks to usurp the rightful place of the true one.

There is only one truth and that is good, but evil always wants to take its place. Submission to truth is freedom but if you submit to an ideology posing as truth, you are enslaved.

There is currently a force in the world that is trying, and largely succeeding, to seduce the human soul into accepting lies as truth and evil as good. One of the ways it does this is through the promotion of equality as the highest good. If you don't believe all human beings are equal, you are a bad person. What this is doing is transposing facts that are real on the spiritual plane to the material one where they do not apply. It is also isolating one aspect of reality which should more accurately be seen in conjunction with another and not on its own. In fact, in the realm of creation, oneness or equality goes together with many-ness or quality. Human beings are never equal in expression. They are at different stages of development and different degrees of openness to God. The human soul is a unity in a hierarchy that stretches through all levels of the created order with the human being unique in this world in that it can, through Christ, participate in the life of its creator.

Most contemporary people are, whether they realise it or not, nihilists. A minority have actively and consciously rejected real goodness and truth, which are spiritual (they must be if they are to be real), and set up material imitations. The majority have simply followed this. But all human beings have an inner connection to God, and if you fail to acknowledge this it is because of a spiritual defect within you. Whether you call this madness or badness is immaterial. Ultimately it amounts to the same thing. The only way back is through repentance which is why the message now must be the same as it was at the time of John the Baptist. Repent and wake up to the reality of God. But do not make the mistake of seeing God in terms of this world as so many religious people now do. If you do then you have not woken up at all. Know yourself to be a spiritual being, not this earthly personality with its earthly goals and priorities. See this world entirely in the light of the reality of God.

Spiritual Transformation

Our being is God’s being. It can be none other. There is none other. But we can only access and be conscious of this universal being or uncreated part of us through the individual soul. We, like God, are a trinity, a three in one, no part of which can be considered separately from the rest, and the Father is only known through the Son on the microcosmic level as on the macrocosmic one. So you cannot isolate one aspect of the trinity of your being and see it out of context with the rest. That is what Buddhism and advaita do. They take the spirit aspect, the uncreated part, and use it to deny or, if you don’t like that word, ignore the rest. But this is an error. We are a composite of being (spirit), soul (individuality) and body or appearance (akin to truth, goodness and beauty). The former is above sexual differentiation but the latter two are not and all are essential parts of the totality of what we are even if there is a hierarchical aspect to this as well in that we should view them from above downwards. But that does not mean that the ‘lower’ parts are unreal or unimportant or not a vital part of who and what we are.

One of the things that Christ did was demonstrate the perfection of the trinity of being. Before him the Buddha showed the way to the uncreated part of ourselves, the uncompounded absolute. But Christ reconciled being and becoming, bridging them in himself and perfecting the latter, and showed our true spiritual goal. More, he actually opened the door to its possibility, a door that until him had been shut. The spiritual end before the advent of Christ was not the same as after his appearance in this world.

In contradistinction to many Eastern religions and some Gnostic Western ones, I do not see the spiritual goal as rediscovering an already existing reality within ourselves. Rather, it is transformation into something new and not yet existent. The metaphor of a seed that grows is the one that best describes the unfoldment of the soul. This does not mean that spirit as such grows but soul grows into spirit and becomes ever more aware of its limitless possibilities.

I said that the advent of Christ changed the spiritual goal for humanity. Jesus was greater than any prophet or avatar because he was not just a projection of divine being manifesting on Earth but the Word Incarnate come to redeem the whole world.  After him the spiritual goal was not simply to free the spirit from entanglement in the body and matter, and the absorption of the individual by the universal as in Buddhism.  It was the marriage between earth and heaven with the former being saved and restored to truth rather than being dismissed as illusion or evil. The old saying that God became man so that man might become God means that man does not just realise he already is God, and only has to detach himself from the outer coverings that obscure this, but he can grow into a spiritual oneness with the Creator that preserves the integrity of his soul and has no end.

In this state there is a duality. It is not the absolute oneness of Eastern non-dualistic philosophies. But that very duality means that is capable of ever greater development. Complete oneness is a spiritual dead end. You have reached the final state of absolute being and that is all there is. But the Christian idea of union with God is a dynamic conception and means there is an eternal and ever deeper fusion of soul and spirit with the two playing off each other to drive spiritual unfoldment on into unimaginable glories. Creation is seen as fulfilling the purpose of God rather than being the pointless aberration it would be in a strict non-duality, as it is in Buddhism if we take that at its own estimation.

Real Christianity does not deny other religions but it shows itself to be bigger than they are.  It cannot be encompassed under the umbrella of a universal spirituality for it goes further than any other form of spirituality. With the advent of Christ, God has shown something utterly new and different.  But this does not negate the old spiritual ways which can be incorporated into this new reality. However they must be baptized and now seen in the light of Christ who illumines them with a deeper reality unsuspected before.

Christian Albion

Here is a continuation of the previous post on sites that evoke in one way or another the spirit of Albion.  It's to be found at
Albion Awakening.

Three Possibilities

Consider the following scenarios.

Materialism is true. There is no God, no spiritual world, no purpose in existence, no meaning, no love, everything dies and that's it. Life is a momentary flicker in the depths of nothingness. Why care about anything since nothing means anything or has any value? Only matter is real.

Behind the world of appearance there is a spiritual world of pure consciousness. By detaching ourselves from worldly association we can come to know this and rest in an eternity of bliss, though this reduces any reality in this world, including that of human individuality and relationships, to fundamental illusion. Only spirit is real.

God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever would believe in him would not die but have everlasting life. God descended to this world in the form of his son to redeem it from sin and give it the opportunity to live life more abundantly. He got his hands dirty out of love for his creation. Spirit is real but so is creation. Neither one can be denied and together they make for something more. 

Which scenario makes the most sense? More to the point, which satisfies one's deepest longings and completes every aspect of our being? 

Clearly it is the third one but does that mean it is true? Actually, yes it does because our being, as a product of reality, echoes reality. It speaks of reality and responds to reality. Only the third scenario answers every question posed by our humanity. The two others both leave important aspects out, whether it be the absence of meaning and transcendence of the first or the obliteration of the individual, and therefore love, of the second. The first two are both cases of either/or and neither includes all of what we are. But the third completes the puzzle of how to reconcile all parts of our nature and brings everything to a glorious and triumphant conclusion. We wouldn't feel the need for this unless it was real. And we do feel the need for it. If you don't, it is because you are suppressing parts of your being as the materialist does and as, in a similar but opposite way, the creation-rejecting spiritualist does. Both of them are abandoning the reality of their humanity for an idea. Both are life-deniers in one way or another.

Has Democracy Failed?

Winston Churchill's famous quip that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the other ones that have been tried is frequently trotted out to hail democracy as the best form of government. I don't know what he thought but that's not what he actually said.  It's obvious what the virtues of democracy are, the fact that the majority of a population gets to choose who governs them, that the government can be thrown out and replaced if desired, that rulers are accountable and so forth. It's equally obvious what its flaws are, that the majority has any idea what is best for the country as a whole, that people vote with their pockets, that politicians think only for the short term and shamelessly appeal to the lower nature of the voters, that the media controls much of what goes on and that, when it comes down to it, there is not much to choose from. Human nature, as we know, tends to corrupt everything it touches and nothing can ever be perfect but democracy does seem to have too many imperfections to regard it as in any way ideal. It's only when it is compared to authoritarian regimes that one can say it's better than they are in that it does at least honour, in principle if not always completely in practice, liberty and choice.

I don't vote because there is no one I could possibly vote for. I have occasionally voted in the past. I voted for the Social Democrats in the 1980s as they initially appeared to be a mould-breaking group but they were quickly absorbed into the mainstream. I think I voted for the Green party once many years ago when it wasn't just a far left organisation. However, on both occasions I felt slightly sullied by the action, as though I had betrayed my principles for expediency. When I looked for why this might have been so I came to the conclusion that each time I hadn't voted for something but against everything else. I had voted for what I regarded as the least bad but not for anything I actually believed in. That doesn't seem a very good basis for anything.

I suppose we get the governments we deserve. We are hedonistic, materialistic, acquisitive, God-rejecting people. We think we are good, or good enough, but we deny the very source of goodness. A truly intelligent society would not need democracy because the way to live would be clear. That doesn't mean it would be authoritarian as in a one party state, but it would be guided by spiritual principles and these are not up for debate. There is no choice in truth. I am not arguing for a theocracy in the old-fashioned sense but a society which realises that politics is subordinate to spirituality is really the only one that can ever work in the long term, and even this depends on the quality of the members of that society.

As the two sides (and there generally are only two that matter) in a democracy become further apart, more and more people start questioning the virtues of democracy. The recent victories of Donald Trump and the leave side in the Brexit referendum have left many on the other side questioning democracy because it hasn't gone their way, even though they usually pretend that this is not what they are doing, so potent is the myth of democracy. But, really, how can we assume that the majority ever knows what is right? It is only the sacred cow of human beings being equal (not found in any spiritual tradition) that makes people think this remotely possible. The only justification for this majority rule is that we get what we deserve and we learn by experiencing the consequences of our decisions. Except we are not really learning, are we?

What's the alternative, you might ask? There is no alternative as truth is not to be found in politics. It is to be found in spiritual realisation, and only when that is put front and centre will we discover how to govern ourselves properly in the material world. In the meantime we will struggle on, making many mistakes and muddling through. Or not. That remains to be seen.

This brief piece is not meant as an attack on democracy because Churchill was probably right at this stage in our evolution when selfhood is being developed in the mass, a situation that has not existed in the world before. The fact is, though, any system is only as good as the people who implement it. The virtue of democracy is supposed to be that it stops too much power being concentrated in the hands of too few people for too long. But what if certain unseen powers manipulate the system so that whoever appears to rule makes no difference to the outcome? It is clear that something like this is what is going on now. Perhaps many democracies are that in name only.

Democracy means rule by the people and it presupposes a more or less egalitarian society which reduces hierarchy to a minimum. But this conceives of life as existing primarily along the horizontal axis and anyone at all aware of spiritual reality knows that this is only one part of what life is, and far from the most important part at that. Any system of organising society that fails to take into account the vertical dimension of being will eventually fail as its inconsistencies become more and more apparent. Plato thought that democracies ended in tyranny as people become drunk with liberty and abused its privileges. Is that what we have to look forward to or will a higher wisdom prevail?

These are just a few rather random thoughts tossed up in the air. They are prompted by Churchill's thought that democracy is the least bad of political systems. But that means that it cannot be good for if it were we wouldn't have to qualify our praise for it in negative terms. No political system is right for all times and all places. They have their moment. Democracy has had a good run in the Western world but it is clearly showing signs of exhaustion, and the fact that in many countries the two sides are further apart than ever doesn't bode particularly well.

There is another point to be made against democracy and it is a cultural one. Can anyone doubt that democracy degrades culture? Just look at the 20th century if you do doubt this. The relentless debasement of all art forms to cater to the masses has led to the present vulgarity and coarseness of the world, the worst there has ever been according to the Masters. Democracy alone cannot be blamed for this for culture will inevitably either descend downwards or else reduce itself to self-obsessed navel-gazing in the absence of religion. But the masses are interested only in immediate entertainment, diversion and stimulation and in a democracy they have the money and power to command these from producers only too willing to pander to their desires for their own benefit. It's a downward spiral.

The political has failed. The next stage can only be spiritual.

Doorways to Albion

I suggested to John Fitzgerald in a comment on the Albion Besieged post that it might be a good idea to do a little series on places where the spirit of Albion seems particularly strong.  The first in the series is now on Albion Awakening.

Albion Besieged

Is Albion asleep or is it us, the inhabitants of Albion, who are are ignorant of the true spirit of the country?


Here is an image which might refresh our memory. 

The Seven Sisters on the Sussex coast

See more on Albion Awakening.

Love Without Wisdom is Foolishness

In fact, it's not even love. I am talking about love as a spiritual virtue here, not the feeling directed towards those we really do love on a personal level. But love as in love your neighbour has to be understood in the context of intelligence or else it descends into sentimentality and self-indulgence.

I am prompted in this thought by the story of an Italian priest who says that all migrants should be let into his country because it's what Christ would have wanted. I don't know whether this is spiritual naivety or just virtue signalling, but it is not what love requires nor can it be assumed it is what Christ would want. For a start, Christ said that the poor will always be with us. This is clearly not a recommendation to stand by and do nothing in the face of suffering but it does imply a measured response. Who is the priest really loving (not that he is really loving, he is just responding to love as an idea)? The migrants, one must suppose. But they are not his neighbours. He does not know them. However, he does know his flock and his fellow countryman. Is he thinking of them and how an influx of tens of thousands of people with no connection to the land they are entering might affect them? Is he thinking of the generations that follow on from the current people of Italy, his spiritual heirs, so to speak, to whom he and his contemporaries could be said to hold the land in charge. What legacy is he leaving them?

All men are brothers is a saying often repeated by spiritual people. I've said it myself. But what does it actually mean? For if all men really are brothers that effectively means none are, not in any serious sense. Do I have the same duties and responsibilities to someone I don't know, living in a land I've never been to, as I do to my actual family and my real neighbours? The wisdom of our forefathers told us that charity begins at home. This is not an excuse to do nothing for those who might be distant to us but it does mean that we should get our priorities right. And our first priority is to protect home and hearth. It may be that sometimes we do have to sacrifice these for the greater good but that is an extreme situation and we had better be sure we know what the greater good is and are not, as this silly priest clearly is, acting from a sentimentalist ideology and pathological altruism.

Sometimes love, as in compassion, is a luxury one cannot afford. I would not be saying this in a hard, cold world where it was every man for himself (though actually this can be just such a world once we go behind what people say to what they really are). But in a world in which the natural human tendency to compassion is exploited to do harm to the spiritual order, where short-term 'feel goodery' triumphs over long-term sense and wisdom, and good to one side is used to justify harm to another, then the point needs to be made that emotional reactions unrestrained by intelligence are foolishness at best and may even be evil.

For to act from love, or, better put, so-called love, can only be spiritually justifiable if the consequences are spiritually good and lead to a situation is which the reality of God is better known and expressed either on an individual or collective basis. 

There's something else this priest and many like him have failed to understand. The real reason we are enjoined to love our neighbour and love our enemy is not for the good such an attitude does them. It is for the good it does ourselves. It is to do with what tends to spiritual salvation not worldly improvement. These are not necessarily mutually exclusive but there is no doubt which is the more important. Real love transforms our being which is the primary consideration when considering the role and purpose of love. Transforming the world by the supposed actions of love is very much secondary and implies effects are more important than causes. True transformation can only come when love and wisdom are both observed.

False Prophets

There's an idea in some spiritual circles that one should not criticise anyone else's approach to God because there are many paths that go up the mountain from different sides and they all meet at the top. Like many errors this has some truth in it. There are indeed different outer paths but they must have the same inner qualities or they will certainly not go to the same place. Just to make the claim that one is engaged in the spiritual quest is by no means good enough. It is how and why you are so engaged that matters. It is how you conceive of spirituality that counts not spirituality itself which is a word that can be used to cover a multitude of sins. After all, even the devil believes in God.

If you care for truth you sometimes have to point out what masquerades as truth but isn't. It may be wholly false such as materialism or it may be part true and part false such as, in my opinion, Islam. It may be actively deceptive or it may just be incomplete. It may appear to glitter but be base metal or it may have shortcomings which don't incapacitate it but still leave it halt and lame at the final race to the line. 

This is not surprising when you consider that humanity is still a long way from understanding the spiritual world so our approach to it is going to be heavily subject to our personal limitations. Unprepared mystics opening themselves up to higher dimensions of reality are often going to be overwhelmed by forces beyond their comprehension and interpret these according to their current intellectual and cultural conditioning or even prejudices. In these latter days we might have a wider range of spiritual teachings to draw upon than ever before but this could potentially just increase confusion. And then you have to factor in human ego which usually corrupts what it touches and can often seek the spiritual for its own ends. The false guru is so well documented these days that it has almost become an archetype. But the desire to be seen as a spiritual expert is one of the most potent forces there is to the fallen human ego. To be on the platform dispensing wisdom to an adoring faithful can be an intoxicating position in which to find oneself.

The Masters told me that there were many teaching half-truths at present. They went on to say that they were not all evil but some were doing good work at their level. Here they drew the distinction between those who take to the spiritual path to advance themselves and those who may be sincere but who lack wisdom. It is not hard to find examples of both. Half-truths can be very alluring because they do contain elements of truth but you will usually find there are also elements that pander to the lower self and indulge it in some way. Or else they focus on one aspect of reality while ignoring or dismissing others, failing to appreciate that in its fullness reality is multi-faceted and, to be complete, all aspects of it must be taken into account and assigned their correct position in the hierarchy of truth.

If we don't point out the false how can we know the true? No doubt in an ideal world we would not have this problem of false teachers and those who mean well but are mistaken, but in that kind of world we might not have so good an opportunity to develop our own inner spiritual awareness by learning to discern bad coin from good. For it is precisely by sifting the range of spiritual teachings in our minds that we can separate the wheat from the chaff and fine-tune our own spiritual antenna. Sometimes we might need help in doing this but we still have to make the decision of what to believe and how to respond to belief ourselves.

Of course, many may consider that some of the things I write here are wrong by the standards of their beliefs or by those of orthodox religion. And I may well be mistaken in some of my beliefs. But it is the attitude behind these beliefs that is important. For instance, I believe in reincarnation as the means whereby consciousness evolves. Others find this a heretical view and will come up with reasons why it cannot be so. I don't mind. It makes sense to me and I have what I think are distant memories connected to past lives but I realise these memories may not be mine and may not even be memories. But, more to the point, I only regard the doctrine of reincarnation as a detail, not essential by any means. Compared to developing love of the Creator, and wisdom by opening yourself up to his mind, it is irrelevant. It is not a pillar of my faith even if I do think it is important in its own way. But the real foundation of what I believe is God as manifested through Christ. The rest is peripheral to that central truth.

False prophets will always be with us. Some are egotistic deceivers and some are just mistaken. It is possible that they may even have something to teach us, whether that be to learn discernment or to broaden our own outlook to include elements of their teaching that may have eluded us. For not everything a false prophet teaches is wrong. But what defines him as false is the overall impact and tenor of his teaching as well as where it comes from. If we think of the higher worlds as hierarchically structured then we might picture the pure unadulterated truth as existing on the highest spiritual level while error can creep in as we descend through the mental and emotional planes. So, if a teacher takes more of his inspiration from these levels than the spiritual then his teaching will be adversely affected. And this is likely to happen if he has insufficiently purified his lower self of the numerous sins and errors to which flesh (including mind) is heir to.

Truth and purity are one. A false prophet does not observe this fact to which there are no exceptions. Of course, no one is completely pure of heart but there are acceptable degrees, and it is the dominating tendency and inclination of our heart that is the determining factor in this matter. So the most important thing for any spiritual aspirant is purity, purity of all aspects of his being from the physical through the emotional and up to the mental. This includes motive and will. Unfortunately, we live in a world in which spiritual purity is not much valued but that should not deter any serious person from striving to purify his or her lower nature. Sincerity and humility mark out the true from the false.

What Is Good?

Anything that contributes towards spiritual awakening and salvation. By this definition many things that are called good are not and some that are thought of as bad are, in fact, good. What is good is what is good in the long term (the term of eternity, you might even say) and from the perspective of spiritual advancement. What is not good is what obscures spiritual intelligence and the awakening of the soul.

Looking at the matter in this way shows that a culture that rejects transcendence, as ours does, has rejected goodness and is therefore bad. But obviously we can't admit to this so we invent a false goodness and condemn those who don't abide by the new rules. This has the dual effect of, on the one hand, corrupting the weakly spiritual whose inner connection to the soul is feebler than their obedience to outer authority, as in society's conventions, and, on the other, leading people away from true goodness into a flattened down version that relates only to the fulfilment of human beings as they appear to be in this world.

Good and bad can only be understood in a spiritual context and in relation to the higher world. To be sure, you can have subsidiary good relating to this world but if that conflicts with the higher good it then becomes evil. That was the lesson that Judas failed to learn when he criticised the woman who anointed Jesus's feet with oil. Just like us he was putting material goodness above spiritual. Just like us he failed to understand what is good.

What is good? It may challenge our preconceptions of goodness. It may reject our hopes and confirm our fears. It may include pain and suffering. It is what leads to joy rather than happiness.

Jordan Peterson and Meaning

Over the weekend I watched part of an address by Jordan Peterson at the Oxford Union in which he was asked a question about meaning and where it came from if not from God. See here at about 29 minutes in. I respect Professor Peterson in that he is probably the most successful challenger of the current left/liberal orthodoxy, and one of the best revealers of its excesses, but here he did not really answer the question. In fact, I would say he evaded it and gave way to the slight sophistry that will occasionally afflict a very articulate person whose way with words can sometimes obscure the fact that he has not said very much. For, as far as I can see, the answer he gave did not talk about meaning at all. It just talked about the appearance of it.  References to Nietzsche, Freud and Jung show where he was coming from.

Continued on Albion Awakening.