Thursday 23 July 2020

Remember The Signs

For many of us when we come into this world we are thrown into a place very hard to come to terms with. This is because our source is in the spiritual world which is a realm of beauty, goodness and truth. But this world, beautiful as it is and it is beautiful because it is the creation of God, is a darkened environment, corrupted by supernatural powers ranged against the light and also by the thoughts and actions of human beings themselves. You may doubt this but the evidence, inner and outer, is irrefutable for anyone alert to spiritual truths.

A large majority allow themselves to be swamped by the world, by 'reality', and generally ignore whatever exists within them that points to a higher reality. Even many religious people do this, seeing their religion in terms of this world instead of using it to see this world in terms of the light of God. But there are also people who are aware of that light within their own minds, however dim it may be, and decide that this is the light in which they must walk, come what may. They retain a connection, even if that has become but a memory, to their true origin which is not in this world but a higher one.

The present time is a crisis in the history of humanity. God and his agents have long known of its coming and have prepared for it as much as possible, given that the crisis was inevitable and they cannot interfere with human free will. The crisis was inevitable because it is partly the result of humanity starting to grow up and become more independent, and that is a good and necessary thing even if the short term consequences are not good. But it is also inevitable because of the nature of time itself and the fact that it proceeds cyclically. That doesn't mean that things go round in circles because time proceeds historically, linearly, too, but there are cycles within the forward moving direction and we are coming to the end of one now. It's both the end of a cycle and a definitive point on the line.

For a sensitive soul the current atmosphere, mental and spiritual, is constantly and aggressively attacking the soul. Such a person feels and even knows one thing but everything around him or her pushes in another direction. It can be hard to sustain a connection to truth when practically the whole modern world is against it. One cannot retreat to the past or adopt the spiritual belief system of a different group of humanity which may be less affected by modernity because it is imperative that one is what one is. By that I mean a person's vision must be whole. You are a person living in this place and at this time. Here and now is where you are meant to be. If you try to be something else there will always be an element within you that is being false. Something will not ring true. Spirituality means integrity or it means nothing.

If you can't escape to a time or place other than here and now, what should you do when you find yourself assailed by the world? When you need spiritual support, where do you go? I mean where other than to a religion but even religion in our day has often been taken up into the world though its truths remain, of course. But no religion is what it was in terms of its spiritual content. You may dispute that on a personal level but in general terms I don't see how you can seriously take exception to the statement. Religion is a public institution and all public institutions have been corrupted. This has been an ongoing process over several decades but the corruption is now so deep that you just can't miss it. This cloud does have a silver lining because it means we are forced back on ourselves and that is as it should be. To become truly spiritual, we must be self-reliant though with the important proviso that we are self-reliant in Christ not reliant on our own spiritual prowess.

I have taken the title of this post from Aslan's advice to Jill when he sent her down from his country into Narnia to carry out a specific mission in The Silver Chair. Before he sent her down he gave her certain instructions and pointed to signs she would encounter that would recall her mission when that might escape her attention in the context of dealing with the everyday world. I believe something similar happens to us. We are sent out from the higher worlds and born into this one. We lose most of our connection to those higher worlds though a kind of afterglow remains in the mind during childhood, to a greater or lesser extent depending on the individual. But we have certain impressions stamped on the soul which we need to make the attempt to access. These are the signs from above that we must remember when the world is too much with us.

4 comments:

Bruce Charlton said...

@William - very good, thought provoking, post.

William Wildblood said...

Thanks Bruce. The other parallel with now in The Silver Chair is when the witch is trying to persuade Pudddleglum, Jill and Eustace that above ground isn't real and comes up with all sorts of spurious reasons why that might be so such as that the idea of the sun is just taken from the fact of a lamp and so on. The old materialist reversal of how things really are.

Bruce Charlton said...

I love that passage too!

https://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2011/01/stamp-on-fire.html

William Wildblood said...

It's interesting that Puddleglum breaks the spell not through argument but the simple practical action of stamping on the fire. I think the lesson in that is that you can argue with materialistic sophists until the cows come home but you will never get anywhere because all argument is on an intellectual level and truth is just known. It cannot be argued about or proved with the rational mind. Ransom ends up doing a similar thing with Weston on Perelandra.