Experts

 No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you never should trust experts. If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require to have their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830-1903)

Nothing would be more fatal than for the Government of States to get into the hands of experts. Expert knowledge is limited knowledge and the unlimited ignorance of the plain man, who knows where it hurts, is a safer guide than any rigorous direction of a specialist.

Sir Winston Churchill

I took these two quotes from an excellent website called Lockdown Sceptics  which consistently makes the case that the coronavirus is not the great evil we are led to believe and that lockdowns do much more harm than good. They seem very appropriate at the present time when we have quite obviously been led up the garden path by people who may be specialists in their fields but are quite ignorant out of them. And that's giving them the benefit of the doubt and assuming they are honest which they may well not be.

It's very easy to mock people who are suspicious of experts. After all the word just means someone who knows what he's talking about, doesn't it? And why would we not listen to such a person? But the trouble is these people are often blinded by their own knowledge and unable to see other wisdom that stands outside that. They can't see the wood for a tree. They are the technocrats of the modern world, the scientists and engineers who want to take over governance from politicians and do things properly. But there are two serious problems here. Politicians, for all their manifold faults, can at least be voted out of office in a democracy. Theoretically, anyway. The technocrats would be there to stay. There would be no means in a society run by such people (as in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, for instance) of getting rid of them. There would be nobody to tell them they are wrong. And they often are wrong because they see the world in terms of data and spreadsheets. In terms of control which invariably will want to do away with individuality and freedom. The technocrat has no real understanding of human beings, of what it is to be human. He certainly has no spiritual understanding. By definition, he rejects that as not subject to his measurements or within his control. He prefers the committee to the individual but no committee ever made a true work of art or genuine scientific discovery.

The Marquess of Salisbury pinpoints what people distrust about experts. Apart from their inability to see the whole picture outside of their speciality, apart from their desire to contain and control, apart from their arrogance and materialism, overt or not, they do not properly acknowledge common sense. Common sense is the ability to see in terms of the whole rather than in parts. Experts only see in terms of parts because their expertise is necessarily a partial thing, limited to a small area which is all they can really see. They are very useful with regard to that small area but not when the matter concerns a greater whole. Even many experts together, unless they have the wisdom and humility to go beyond the expert mind, have the limitations of their class, a blinkered view and an inability to see human beings as multi-dimensional spiritual beings with purpose that goes beyond the mundane.

Obviously if I have a toothache I will go to a dentist and I'm very glad the person who looks at my teeth is not the same one that cuts my hair as once was the case. But we don't want experts to run the world because they will see it in terms of their own field. What politicians should do and what they have not been doing is listen to many sorts of experts from many fields and then take decisions based on all the input, ideally subjected to common sense, pragmatism, balance and the long term. But that requires an honest man who wants to do the right thing in respect of God and his fellow men and that's a rare beast now.

Freedom and Truth

It's been curious to see over the last 9 months how few people really seem to care about freedom. That may be because they are so used to it they don't recognise its gradual erosion but it may also be because they don't care as long as they are personally comfortable. That's a very short-term attitude because a reduction of freedom will certainly affect their degree of personal comfort soon enough.

Closely allied to a concern for freedom is a concern for truth. I have noticed that the very same individuals who will not stand up for freedom are often quite happy to ignore truth. The two things clearly go together as is obvious once you think about what they are. You cannot have truth without freedom and nor can you have freedom without truth. Not to value one means you don't value the other. 

So many people are spiritually irresponsible. This means that they perceive everything in terms of its impact on their own selves. They are the centre of their world. But a spiritual person sees God as the centre of the world, not himself, and God is the source of both freedom and truth. He is at once their ultimate origin and their only guarantor. Our loss of religious faith has brought in its train a loss of concern for truth because inevitably without religion we become unable to understand there even is such a thing as truth which exists beyond ourselves and our petty material interests. And when we forego truth we submit to power, the power of whatever group happens to dominate at the moment, and then we also forego freedom.

If you value freedom you must value truth, and if you value these things which are as essential for man's spiritual well-being as food and drink are for his body, then you must look to God, a divine being, as their only possible source. There is no freedom in the material world and without truth there is no meaning. Those who are prepared to sacrifice freedom and truth for expedience are basically nihilists and consequently will only find death. This is because freedom is what defines a human being. No other life form in this world has freedom. It is the mark of a spiritual being and its loss leads to the destruction of the spiritual aspect of human nature. If you are prepared to forego freedom, as so many people do seem prepared to do now, you are foregoing your very humanity.

Don't Be Unreasonable

I guarantee this is something we are going to hear more and more. We already hear it about those who refuse to wear masks or accept Covid-19 as the Black Death of our day. Trump supporters are being told it after the recent election, despite widespread evidence that fraud was indeed a factor in the Democrats' victory. No doubt when Brexit turns out to be not Brexit after all we will be told it again. When the coronavirus vaccine becomes widely available those who are reluctant to take it, for very good reasons - why accept an improperly tested vaccine for a largely non-fatal illness?- will be told they are being unreasonable.

If you haven't learnt by now that evil's modus operandi is to start small and then incrementally ramp things up until you are doing and believing things you never would have dreamed of doing or believing 10, 20, 30 years ago, then you really have not being paying attention. If you haven't realised that the coronavirus is being used as an excuse to dismantle long-cherished but now taken for granted freedoms from a largely supine population then you are asleep. This is all fundamentally a spiritual assault but even those who have no spiritual concerns should be able to see what is going on, and be deeply concerned about it. Human beings are being herded into pens, ideological pens and even, what with the lockdowns, physical pens. The most likely to be able to resist this, white males, are the ones who are being most denigrated so that their powers of resistance are diminished. This notwithstanding the fact that it is also white males in large part who stand behind the creeping totalitarianism.

There will be plenty of excuses for those who do not want to see the truth or who are too lazy to stand up against it. The lockdowns, the masks, the vaccinations are all there to protect us. This is a lie. They are there to control us. Of course, the need for them is dressed up so as to appear beneficial to human beings, and it can be hard to prove that there is no need for them. But it is not hard to see this if you bother to look with clarity. This is one of those cases where arguments can be made on both sides but those who are in any way aware of spiritual realities know what is going on. Arguments are really a waste of time in this case, even if it is good to have them at one's disposal. It is not arguments that will convince most people. It is intuitive realisation. What is required above all today is the power of discernment. This is a spiritual survival tool that everyone must develop and the way to develop it is to learn to look up, beyond this world and to the real source of the good. Not ideological good as the modern world prizes but actual good.

Therefore I say to everyone who reads this that it is time to be unreasonable. Because now to be unreasonable in the eyes of the world is to be reasonable in the eyes of God. The two positions do not always conflict with each other but they often do and they certainly do now. Don't be swayed by the smooth words you hear to justify the loss of freedoms. However plausibly dressed up the excuses for this are, they are lies. Don't be afraid of seeming unreasonable. Don't be deliberately contrary or picture yourself as some kind of freedom fighter for truth. That is also a trap, designed to push you into egotism if you do not fall into compliance. But hold fast against worldly arguments while being centred in the truth of God, dedicating yourself to his service in love and humility. Then all will be well.

The Meaning of Religion

I'm probably being very foolish in trying to define something as deep and wide as religion but the question arose when I asked myself what we most lack today. We don't lack morality of a sort, meaning a morality based on totally materialistic considerations, but morality does not lie at the heart of what religion is. In fact, I would say that a highly moral atheist is a worse person, worse in the sense of further away from truth and real goodness, than a sincere believer who, despite his belief, sins and who might even be a bad person in the eyes of the world.

This is because the believer has something the atheist lacks which is not belief as such but openness to transcendence. It is this that lies at the heart of any proper religion or religious attitude. I say it is not belief as such because you can believe anything. In a way what you believe is of secondary importance. What truly matters and what defines real religion is this inner openness, this sensitivity to a higher reality. Of course, this by itself is nowhere near enough and it can be deformed by the way we react to it, by the mental interpretation (belief) we put on it. But without a sense of transcendent reality (an open spirit is more important than an open mind), no man or woman can be called religious.

So, the essence of religion is not morality and it is not belief. These are important and necessary adjuncts but without spiritual sensitivity they are nothing. Spiritual sensitivity needs to be worked on and developed but it is the foundation of religion, and if it is missing the individual in whom it is missing, be he ever so good as the world defines good, clean-living, moral, a giver of charity and all the rest of it, lives in spiritual darkness and will not be saved which means released into heaven after death. If you do not in a certain sense live in heaven now, if your mind does not already tend towards it and if you are not inwardly yearning for it, you will not find it later. If your heart reaches up to heaven, notwithstanding that your behaviour might fall well short of what is required, then you are saved. You will have work to do but you are facing towards the light. It is this idea that lies behind the doctrine that mere belief in Jesus saves. It is not the intellectual belief that saves for it surely does not. It is spiritual receptivity, openness to the divine. That is the only true belief, and this is what lies at the root of all true religion.

The Descent of Man

This is the time of the inversion of values when everything is turned upside down so that top becomes bottom and bottom top. We call this progress because we have lost all connection to spirit and transcendent reality but, in fact, it is nothing more than the collapse of being to the plane of matter which, without spirit, becomes chaos as in unqualified formlessness. It can never quite reach that state because spirit exists whether we believe in it or not but it can approach it and, the less we do acknowledge transcendence, the closer we will approach it. Virtually everything the modern world is based on comes from the rejection of spirit.

The descent from spirit to matter is recognised in traditional teachings on the four ages, ages which descend from Gold to Silver to Bronze to Iron. The Golden Age is fully open to spirit. This was the world now only known to us in myth when gods walked the Earth and civilisation and culture were based on reconstructing the pattern of the heavens. Authority was with sacred leaders who were in touch with the higher worlds and transmitted the sense of those worlds to the populace who themselves instinctively responded to the reality of spirit.

The law of entropy applies to cycles of human existence as it does to everything in the material world. As time passed consciousness became more constricted and the material world more present. Leadership passed to the second caste, a warrior aristocracy of kings and nobles. There was still a strong sense of the spiritual but the affairs of this world began to assume a greater prominence. This, by the way, only applies to more advanced sections of humanity who were able to form coherent civilisations. Primitive people, unfashionable as it may be to say that there were such, existed in the typical primitive state of closeness to the earth, generally speaking unable to separate themselves from nature.

At this point we should say that in one sense the whole of historical time is part of the Iron Age when matter is the main focus of conscious awareness and spirit has fallen from its rightful pole position. But there are cycles within cycles, patterns are repeated on higher and lower levels, and the descent from Gold to Iron is repeated even within the Iron Age itself as it is within all authentic human civilisations.

The descent to the third phase comes when aristocracies degenerate, losing touch with their core virtues such as honour, chivalry, loyalty and responsibility for those over whom they stand. Power now shifts to money and those who trade, the merchant or, in modern terms, the banker and the industrialist. The economy is of central concern and higher values begin to be lost and replaced by utilitarian ones, appropriate to the material plane on which attention is now concentrated, thrift, industriousness and practicality. Equivalent vices come into play too. But then there comes a further descent and power begins to shift to what was traditionally regarded as the lowest caste, what we today call the people or the masses. Simply by virtue of numbers they start to become of significance. We have entered the age of quantity in which matter assumes the rights of spirit with the consequent inevitable loss of all higher values relating to truth, goodness, beauty etc. This is clearly the age we are now in though it must be recognised that there is always considerable overlap between ages.  We might regard this new phase as starting around the time of the French Revolution, given a large boost with the Russian Revolution and now spreading throughout the West. Even if the masses do not yet have actual political power, as the merchant class still holds onto that in most places, they can influence it enormously, and they undoubtedly have cultural power due to their increased financial power and also the fact that materialism is the default belief system even among many religious people who effectively relegate their religion to a subset of an overall material world view. The current dogma of egalitarianism is a tell tale sign of the descent of power to the mass population.

We can see the decay of spiritual influence in every area of human life as would naturally be the case since it is a universal phenomenon that primarily affects consciousness though the psychic and physical environments also coarsen. Art which started off as sacred then became 'high' and is now more or less just popular is a particularly obvious example but you can see the descent everywhere. Nothing is exempt, including, and in some ways especially, religion.

I don't reject Darwin's theory of evolution as a partial explanation of how animal forms developed but it is very one-sided. Unlike the two other apostles of modernism with whom he is sometimes bracketed, namely Marx and Freud, he was clearly a serious scientist engaged in serious work which could have brought about, if regarded as applying only to certain aspects of the creative/evolutionary process, a real advance in understanding. But unfortunately it was taken as a complete description of how life developed and grew. It has become the creation myth of the materialist and the extraordinary harm it has done is seldom recognised. For what it did was to reduce Man to a creature that ascended from the mud instead of descending from the stars, and it is used as a justification for all the spiritual degradation we see today. If we are solely material, only material values matter. We are all equal, all equally nothing. 

But the attempt to establish equality, believe it or not, and most people won't believe it, is actually a gross spiritual error. What was the first attempt in this vein? It was Satan's attempt to be equal to God. He then encouraged Adam and Eve to do the same thing. Myth, you say? Perhaps, but myth is putting inner truths into story form. Equality is not a Christian virtue. Certainly God loves all his children and they all have their rightful place in the hierarchy of being, one that no other can fill, if they follow the correct path. But the created world is precisely based on this hierarchy of being which provides it with all its extraordinary richness. In terms of creation movement into the spiritual requires increased differentiation, differentiation in overall oneness, yes, but each created being must realise his or her full individuality to be an authentic soul. Pure oneness or equality is sameness and can only exist in a non-manifested state or that of formless matter which is the direction we are currently headed as all spiritual order and structure break down. Those who wish to break free of this downward pull must recognise it for what it is or they will be pulled down with it.

Freedom and Slavery

Nobody can have any real idea as to what is going on in the world today who doesn't acknowledge the supernatural element. That is why people make the wrong choice over and over again now. But once you do, and you realise that we are seeing the outward manifestation of a spiritual battle in which the prize is human souls, many things fall into place.

The two great bastions of freedom in the world were England and America which explains why so much work has been put into attempting to destroy them. If the desired end of a global totalitarianism is to be be achieved, one which has an ultimately spiritual goal of enslaving souls, all obstacles must be removed. This is also the reason the white male is so attacked nowadays. He is the most likely to resist the destruction of freedom.

Freedom is the fundamental spiritual quality. It is more fundamental even than love since love depends on the reality of freedom to exist in the first place. Machines cannot love. Slaves cannot love. I am not talking about physical slavery which is the least of slaveries but spiritual slaves in which the mind and even the soul are possessed. Now, this can only happen if you let it happen but outer conditions are being manipulated into creating the best environment for it to happen. Freedom can be found at any moment in even the most extreme cases by turning to God but how many people actually want to do that?

All around the world today we see forces engaged in the destruction of freedom. The Covid-19 lockdowns where you are obliged to stay in your house and wear a covering on your face when you go out, the climate change agenda which seeks to curtail freedom and choice and exercise rigid control, environmentalism (or what it has become since being hijacked by leftism) which values Nature over Humanity (and Nature seen not as God's creation but a kind of unconscious earth goddess), the anti-racism movement which wants to colonise the mind with a lie so that quality is expunged and mediocrity encouraged. Political correctness in general. 

Without a strong religious revival nothing can be done to stop the drift leftwards away from freedom and into control. Nothing except religious faith will be strong enough to withstand this drift which is becoming more of a torrent. I maintain that no leftist really believes in God. Left-wing people may think or claim they believe in God but they don't because, if you do, that belief overwhelms everything else, and leftism is the belief in Man. It is the religion of Man in which he worships himself in the abstract. Humanity as 'it'. The leftist virtues are niceness and tolerance, but these are virtues of materialists for they are directed at the transitory mortal man not the spiritual soul. Indeed, they deny the soul and, unless superseded by a love of the true good, will lead to spiritual death. Satan loves niceness and tolerance because they give him the same rights as God.*

This is the story of the world today and tomorrow. Unless we see our origin and destination as beyond this world we risk being trapped in matter even after we die. Matter is unfree but in this world it is illumined by spirit and we have the chance to break out of it. We are here to be given the chance to ascend to spirit.  If we reject that chance through the simple act of denial we condemn ourselves to darkness. For how long, I don't know. God is merciful but he has also given us the power to choose and he cannot take that back even to save us from the wrong choice.

*Added note: Niceness and tolerance maintain and support the earthly human as earthly human rather than seeing that as the outermost part of a spiritual soul needing to grow into divine awareness. They, and this reaches to the core of the profound spiritual error of the left, treat men and women as quantitative units rather than individual souls. Naturally, one is not saying that niceness and tolerance are bad things in themselves but they are not primary and, if made so, they become bad things, especially when used to dismantle the reality of spiritual authority and hierarchy. For reality and truth are not democratic. 

Good and Evil

 Does this make sense? 

The strong antipathy and disgust that good has for evil comes from a love of the good. The hatred that evil has for good comes from resentment, pride, fear and the desire to bring down and destroy. Two emotions that may, on the face of it, seem similar but which come from very different sources.

Soul or Body. Which Comes First?

Here are some thoughts on body and soul.

The materialist believes the soul is the expression of the body. But the body cannot be free, being the product of arbitrary material forces that have temporarily come together to give the appearance of something real. Neither then the soul be free, and when these material forces fall apart, the apparently real person they have formed falls apart too and nothing is left of him except his constituent parts which are scattered to the four winds.

If the materialist is right it means that love, beauty and goodness do not exist except as hallucinations of the mind. You and I do not exist except as illusionary concepts with no substance. So nothing matters.

The religious person believes the body is the expression of the soul. The soul is free, a creation of God who gives it his own life and freedom. Therefore, its sense of individuality is real. It has a purpose and it is on a journey towards something that will, if the path is trodden correctly, bring it to glory. 

If the religious person is right everything matters. There is such a thing as truth and if we do not conform to it that will be to our great loss.

Modern belief denies the soul but pretends there can be meaning and truth and goodness without it. This is totally contradictory. If there is no soul, there is nothing. To go through life, we must practice constant self-deception until we cease to be.

But if there is a soul we must live according to that truth which means reorient ourselves to that reality, and this requires a complete turnabout in our attitude to life and ourselves.

Reality or non-reality. That is our choice. There is nothing in between.

Spiritual life or death. To be free or to be a slave. The choice between these two extremes is being made more clear in every aspect of our lives. When we deny freedom, we choose death

Added note: Apart from its spiritual sense this post is also a comment on wider political events. There is an ongoing battle between forces of freedom and totalitarianism, between that which favours the individual and that which subordinates the individual to the dictates of a globalist technocracy. This reflects the fundamental view of which comes first, soul or body.

The Next Ten Years

We are living in the spiritual ruins of Western civilisation. I don't say the decline but the ruins. It is extraordinary how few people see this but I suppose that's the point. If more people saw it then it wouldn't be the ruins. Something would be done. Part of the problem is that the idea of virtue has not collapsed so we are not living in an anarchic, every man for himself free for all. But virtue has been reduced to something with no transcendent aspect with the result that it relates to the horizontal plane only. That is to say, the material world alone. All things relating to the good, which are really rooted in the vertical and transcendent, have been brought down to the earthly. Truth, love and beauty have all lost their spiritual aspect and are reimagined in purely material terms. Of course, they have no substance and no proper source outside the spiritual so we are just left with the imitation of these things, the husk without the corn.

I've written a lot of apocalyptic sounding posts recently which must seem rather depressing. I apologise. But my excuse is that events have been considerably ramped up recently. The work of the last century is now bearing its poisoned fruit. The seed was planted, the tree grew, the evil flowers blossomed (in the 1960s one might say since that combined a certain beauty with great spiritual destruction), and now the fruit has ripened and we are being force fed it. Lies are everywhere, politics, art and science are all corrupted, the media is the propaganda arm of forces inimical to human good and even religion appears to be on its last legs.

The dominant ideology of the day is egalitarianism but this has not come about to raise the lower as we are led to believe. The real hidden motive behind it was always to bring down the higher. Egalitarianism inevitably means cultural relativism and brings in its train a universal levelling down. Once the higher is no longer acknowledged as higher, a word which includes the sense of better, it is effectively destroyed and the lower dominates. When the ladder of being, traditionally described as a tree with its roots in heaven, is not recognised it falls down and human life remains at ground level, as now. Today there is no means to climb up out of this world into a higher one whose values are different. These will include any values of this world but seen in a new and transforming light.

The next ten years will see a steady tightening of the grip of the egalitarian dogma used as a means to cut off access to any higher reality and restrict us to the material plane. Egalitarianism won't apply to the elites, of course, who will remain in control but it will be used as a way of preventing escape from that control by the ordinary man or woman. On the anticipated timescale it seems this might be complete by the year 2030. The idea is to erect a kind of psychological barrier all round the world with the words "No way out" stamped across it in big black letters. But this like so much else is a lie. There is always a way out and that is the full acceptance of God.

I am reminded of an old Indian teaching which I believe I first came across in the teaching of the 19th century Bengali saint Ramakrishna. He maintained that while in ancient times great efforts of asceticism and profound meditation were necessary to attain spiritual liberation, in the Kali Yuga (i.e. now) all that would be required would be to repeat the name of God with a humble and contrite heart. Conditions would be so grim that God in his mercy would allow just this one sincere act to be enough for salvation. Perhaps because to get even that far in such a degenerate time would imply great spiritual dedication.

Let this be a comfort in the days to come. We don't need to be spiritual supermen. We just need to turn to God in love and understanding of what his existence means, what it demands and what it gives. Though there will undoubtedly be trials, these will end in triumph.