Loss of Truth

I wonder if future historians will look back at the last decade and conclude that this was the time when the Western world finally went insane. I can only hope so as it will mean that some form of sanity has been recovered. Will they note that the condition had been building up for more than a century but in this period the evil seeds planted in, for the sake of argument (because actually the real seeds go much further back), the 18th century when faith began to be lost, finally flowered?

It is the loss of faith that is the root cause of the insanity. More precisely, for the West it is the loss of Christianity which entails the loss of belief in an underlying spiritual reality, a foundation of truth. When this sense has gone then there is no truth and we are free to make our own reality. But that is not real, not really real. It only depends on the whim of the moment. You're a man who wants to be a woman? No problem. Nothing is real so anything can be. Mind you, when a society has taken this attitude why should it stop there? I'm a cannibal. Why should I not be? Because you can do what you want as long as you'd don't hurt someone else. But why shouldn't I hurt anyone else? Is there a real reason, other than the purely utilitarian one, why I shouldn't? If it's just so that society can run smoothly without self-destructing, why should that concern me? I make my own reality. I can do what I want because, for me, there is no other reality. This can be taken to even more absurd lengths. There is no logical reason in a materialistic universe why I should not rob, rape, kill and so on. If there is no sub-stratum of reality, this should not be a problem, certainly not a moral problem. When nothing is real, nothing matters and this is the course we have set ourselves on. The denial of spiritual truth is the denial of any truth at all. When the human mind has no bedrock of truth in which to establish itself, it becomes deranged. We are only at the beginning of that period now because we have only just reached the point at which the legacy from our Christian inheritance has finally begun to run out. Previous generations may have, as they would have thought it, moved on from Christianity but they still operated in a world formed by Christianity and adopted many of its tenets. No more.

The real Christian influence is no more, or vastly reduced, but this means that a fake Christian influence can be introduced. Because Christianity is part of our history everyone has at least a superficial notion of what it is. But we no longer have any deep idea as to its proper meaning. Thus, we take its tangential elements, the ones that can relate to a materialistic world, and apply them, separating them from their spiritual origins and thinking we are taking the essential and just dropping the superstitious bits when we are actually doing the reverse. But because we don't acknowledge the spiritual, we simply ignore it. So, we can take love your neighbour and use that to create the kind of society in which proper qualitative differences and standards are erased. But we ignore love God which is the first and primary commandment from which all the others grow and without which the others are meaningless. We can take the idea of oneness in Christ, a spiritual unity of souls raised to a higher level, and distort that into egalitarianism, a kind of materialistic unity, a unity outside Christ, which denies the hierarchical nature of truth.

I have written on more than one occasion of how in the present age the devil is using the idea of love (love your neighbour, love your enemy) to destroy truth, and how the fact of oneness is used to deny the fact of difference. Many people are fooled by this and go along with it because they have no solid metaphysical foundations. Their beliefs are weak since they abandoned God and with Him the sense of an absolute reality. This means they can be herded in any direction chosen by the powers that seek to manipulate reality. In the past humanity has been led astray by hatred. That is still the case, of course, even though the hatred is generally disguised and presented as something good. However, in our day we are also led astray by a false idea of love. This is used to dismantle traditional societies with their basis in spiritual ideals which often have a separative element in them as there must be a separation between good and evil, right and wrong, truth and lies, the higher and the lower etc, and then rebuild in a completely materialistic form. It is a levelling down for materialistic oneness can only be on the most basic of levels, that of simple unformed matter.

What this amounts to is that Christian ideas that relate to this world are now used to subvert real Christian values which are rooted in the transcendent. This is like cutting down a tree and then presenting rotting apples lying on the ground as though they were fresh fruit on the bough. Christian ideas separated from God become in a short space of time these rotting apples.

All this having been said, it is nevertheless true that we did need to move on from the past view of Christianity as a religion of rules and outer authority to a new one in which faith, understanding and authority transferred from the outer world to the inner. We should have made the truth of Christ our own, progressing, as it is sometimes expressed, from the world of Peter to that of John. Our understanding of Christianity should have deepened to incorporate the idea of ourselves as sons and daughters of God, called to express that relationship in the fullest way. This means that Christ is not just up in heaven. He is also within ourselves and our job is to fit ourselves as a worthy receptacle for his light. This is all in the traditional understanding of Christianity but was rarely brought out into full view and shown to be the whole point of the religion. But we had reached the stage at which we should have started to become spiritual adults, leaving the childhood of faith. Faith is good and necessary at all stages of the spiritual path but it can develop into something more than simple belief into a deeper intuitive understanding.

Western Man has reached a critical point in ego consciousness and needs to advance from that. He has developed his individual ego, separating himself from an instinctive group consciousness, and with that the rational side of his nature. Now what he should be doing is start to progress to a conscious creative union with the Father, spiritual responsibility. Unfortunately, what he actually appears to be doing, in the mass and as things stand anyway, is falling back into the amorphous spiritual immaturity of the Mother, an unconscious union or return to Chaos, the state of undifferentiation. There are reactions against this but they are mostly on the ego consciousness level itself. We need to create a world in which the mature ego is able to transcend itself while retaining full individual integrity. That is the path laid out for us by Christ taking him as a kind of spiritual template.

We had to fall away from one form of spiritual belief in order to develop another in which inner understanding replaced outer acceptance. This should have involved a brief period of individualism, materialism even, quickly superseded by a higher spiritual life in which Man and God combine as they did in Jesus. Obviously not on such a high level to begin with but we should have embarked on that path. This is not what has happened. The individualism has become more entrenched because we have preferred self to God. That is what this is all about. We have preferred the little shrunken enclosed world of the separate self, the rebellious ego, to the greater world of our Divine Creator. And why? Because we have no love in us, no love for what is beyond us, a reality without which we would disappear as though we had never been. The only way to move out of the insanity of the present time is to develop this love and that means to forget ourselves and return to God, seeing ourselves this time as sons and daughters of the Father, able to grow into ever deeper communion with him. But recall what he said through the one he sent to bring us back to him. "If you love me, keep my commandments."