Death and After

All religious people need to have at least some understanding of death and what it is. In fact, everyone needs this since we all die but those who are serious about the spiritual life should do so in particular. The basic thing to say is that it is the shedding of the physical body and the release of the soul into the spiritual world but then you have to ask what is the soul and what is the spiritual world?

In the post mortem sense the soul is you, your mind and character which, to begin with at least, remain unchanged. The body is gone and one must assume that all conditions, mental as well as physical, that were linked to the body are removed. Does this mean that the blind can see and the senile regain their faculties? I would doubt there is a sudden change as that might be too shocking but there may be a gradual lifting of the darkness, both visual and psychological. Then the person stands forth as he is. But where is he? That depends on the person. In the spiritual world outer reflects inner so your environment after death will reflect your spiritual state. For some that might mean a plane of dimness and emptiness, for others there will be light both in the sense of illumination and the feeling of no longer being pulled down and trapped by the heaviness of matter. 

For all, though, the death of the physical body will be followed, sooner or later, by the stripping of self. First of all, the physical body has been shed but there remain many other layers of falseness and artificiality that we have built up and surrounded ourselves with as a shield and defence and wall against life while in the world. We all have an image of ourself with which we identify and which we project outwards and this must be dismantled completely before we are ready to move on to more celestial regions.

So, the first thing to be done after death if we wish to ascend is purification. This corresponds to purgatory in the Christian tradition. Only the pure can enter a world of purity. There can be no darkness in heaven. However, this may not apply to everyone. There will be worlds corresponding to hell in which the soul suffers the consequences of its attachment to one or several of the various sins, and others more like limbo where the great mass of souls probably find themselves. Limbo is a kind of semi-material world that interpenetrates the physical and is like the astral plane or desire world of occultism. The astral plane itself has many levels, some of which may be dark and dull, others reflecting higher forms of consciousness but these are all the creation of the created which is to say the outgrowth of human desire, imagination and thought. In these worlds the soul when it has found its appropriate place will be happy with all earthly woes and problems removed. It can live as it likes but it will not know God or the higher spiritual realities though there may be an imitation of these to which the conventionally religious may gravitate, and here they stay until they experience the inner urge to move on and progress to higher levels. Some may even think they are in heaven for this is a state of natural happiness in which the earthly kinds of desires can be satisfied. But there is no real spiritual fulfilment and no consciousness of the presence of God. The conventionally good person may gravitate here as well as those who are still attached to the phenomenal side of life.

At higher levels we may find regions corresponding to the prelapsarian Paradise, and also to the heavens of the various pagan religions. The spiritual law is like attracts like so what you are is where you go. To get to higher/subtler realms you must work to eradicate that in you that acts as ballast, essentially sin and ignorance, and encourage the finer feelings of spiritual aspiration and attraction to what is truly noble and good. Part of this is developing imagination but not in the worldly sense in which we understand that word now. True imagination is receptivity to higher things. It is linked to spiritual sensitivity.

Paradise is spiritual but it is not divine, the difference being that it is still part of Creation. Above Paradise there is the true Heaven which is where the fully purified soul stands in the presence of the Creator who is now known as the very essence of your own soul. He is still God the Creator but he is is also fully immanent. There is no separation between you and him. However, Heaven is not a single place where every soul is the same as every other soul. If anything, souls in heaven are more individual not less so. They are now fully themselves, a unique aspect of God, now completed, but at the same time while every soul in heaven may be filled with God, there is always more God to be known and so every soul stands at a point in which God may be at the centre of their being but they can always move closer to the centre of God's being. The law of life is growth and this continues in Heaven as it must or else Heaven would have a lack in it. It is not pure being as opposed to becoming but being and becoming together, always working to create something more.

Here I must introduce the vexed question of reincarnation. As a believer in that mechanism for the education of souls I would say that most souls, after a spell in one or several of the inner planes, experience an urge to return to Earth to further their development in a sphere in which that is possible, the material plane of full separation. Those who ascend to Heaven after life in this world are probably fewer in number than we have been told. At either end of the human scale there are those who are damned and those who are fully saved but many souls, in my opinion, need to return and continue with their course of spiritual development in this world. 

I will add a proviso. This might have been the pattern of the past. But we are at the end of an age. Now, souls may be facing an end of term examination in which their future paths are determined. It may be that the course is ending and souls must make definitive choices. That is my personal feeling. It also explains the vastly expanded world population. We are being called either to go up higher or, if we refuse to embrace that destiny, to fall back. The tests are coming thick and fast and it may well be that "wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: (but) strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it." Words to take seriously now more than ever when everything in the world is conspiring to lead us to the wide gate and broad way.

Ancient Egypt

Like many people I have long been fascinated by ancient Egypt and its otherworldliness. Despite its strangeness it seems to capture something profound and mysterious about humanity in a way that is not seen anywhere else. There really is something magical about Egypt. I have visited the country twice and each time coincided with a dramatic change in my life.

The first time I went there was in 1978. This was shortly after I had become interested in spirituality and a few months before I went to live with Michael Lord. So, an ideal time really as I was ready to absorb the deeper message of Egypt. My eyes had begun to be opened to the inner truths of life and Egypt was the perfect place to take that further since the whole ancient Egyptian civilisation was based on the understanding that this world was a reflection of a higher reality. Ancient Egypt was dedicated to manifesting that reality by living life on earth according to the pattern of heaven. Literally so in some instances as many of the Egyptian gods were star gods. For example, Isis was linked to Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, and her consort Osiris was connected to the constellation Orion.

The 3 stars of Orion's belt (upper centre) point down to Sirius

I first arrived in Egypt at the port of Alexandria, coming on a boat from Piraeus in Greece. Alexandria was and is an East meets West type of city, combining elements of Greece and Egypt and making of them something that might justly be regarded as the intellectual seed of the modern world. I mean that in a positive sense. The destruction of its ancient library is widely regarded as one of the great cultural tragedies of the world in which a vast amount of pagan wisdom was lost but Alexandria was also a major centre of early Christianity. Its patriarchate was supposedly founded by St Mark around 40 AD and later on many of the Church Fathers such as Clement, Origen and Athanasius lived and taught there. At the same time, Alexandria was home to Neoplatonic philosophers of the order of Plotinus and Hypatia. Oddly enough, not long before I visited the city I had read Charles Kingsley's novel about this famous female philosopher who was murdered by a Christian mob and whose virtues might even have been incorporated into the myths about St Catherine. All of which is to say that in the early centuries of the first millennium Alexandria was a city that was home to the best and brightest of both Christians and pagans. If any one place was the birthplace of the modern world it was perhaps Alexandria but it also contained within itself the wisdom of the past.

From Alexandria I took a train to Cairo where I spent the next couple of weeks. I couldn't go further south because at that time such trains as there were, which was not many, were all booked up for the next month which seems strange now but it was a simpler time with fewer tourist facilities. As it turned out, that was a fortuitous circumstance because it gave me more time to explore Cairo itself and the Giza plateau.

I wasn't too thrilled with Cairo at first. It seemed chaotic, dirty and smelly not to mention very hot. But I soon got over that and began to appreciate what you might call the authenticity of the place though this was helped by the fact that there still existed at that time those old colonial style clubs from the 1930s where you could have an ice cold beer under a fan and all was gleaming brass and shiny brown leather with immaculately dressed waiters in white uniforms topped off by a bright red fez. But my hotel was not like that. Basic sums it up but it was certainly cheap and served a nice guava jelly at breakfast.

On several occasions I went off to see the pyramids. If I had been able to go down (or is it up in Egyptian terms?) to Luxor I probably would have gone only once but being restricted to Cairo meant I could take more time in exploring the whole area in and around Giza including the little village, as it was then, that had grown up in the vicinity. I spent some time walking around all three pyramids and the Sphinx and also investigated some of the smaller structures that are there. I even went a little way out into the desert, this being the first time I had ever seen a real desert. Its great emptiness and expanse makes it an apt symbol for the boundless infinity of universal spirit and a fit object for the contemplation of eternal things. 

In complete contrast to the the desert was the interior of the Great Pyramid. These represent two spiritual extremes, eye-achingly bright light and deep darkness, wide open space and the drawing in of everything to a still centre in which all power seems to be concentrated. This is the King's Chamber located in the heart of the Great Pyramid. To reach it you must go through an outside entrance located about 20 feet above ground, not the original entrance but one cut later, and then descend by a narrow passageway a short distance before reascending by another passageway which, like the first, is only about 3 feet high so you have to bend your head, symbolically significant, no doubt. You then reach the impressive Grand Gallery which at 28 feet high and around 150 feet long conveys a strong sense of ceremony and grandeur as though it leads to somewhere of importance.

Which, of course, it does. At the top of the gallery there is a short tunnel that leads through a small antechamber into the King's Chamber. Before going to Egypt I had read A Search in Secret Egypt by Paul Brunton which was first published in 1935 in which he describes a night spent alone in the King's Chamber and the strange experience that befell him there. Now, I don't necessarily believe everything Brunton says. He was a journalist and had a journalist's imagination, but he was also a good writer and introduced many people in the West to Indian philosophy. His two travel/spiritual books about India and Egypt are still very much worth reading, and he had many insights into all aspects of the mystical and esoteric. I owe him a spiritual debt which I am happy to acknowledge. Whether he really did have the experience he describes in which during his night alone in the King's Chamber he was initiated into the mysteries of the after death state by the psychic forms of ancient Egyptian High Priests I can't say. But it's not impossible. The King's Chamber is a deeply mysterious place and it may well have served as a sanctuary for the initiation of qualified candidates into the Mysteries. Egyptologists maintain it was merely a tomb for the pharaoh Khufu but it is remarkably plain with undecorated walls and an austerity that is not what you would expect for a pharaoh. I didn't spend a night there but I was alone in the chamber for 10 minutes or so and there certainly was, as Brunton says, "a powerful atmosphere".

The King's Chamber with sarcophagus

My copy from 1977

An Egyptian pound note from 1978 I found inside the book which I must have kept as a bookmark

On another occasion I climbed to the top of the third and smallest pyramid which is the one thought to have served as the tomb of the pharaoh Menkaure from the 4th Dynasty, around 2,600 BC. It is only around 200 feet high now as compared with the Great Pyramid which was originally around 480 feet high though is a bit smaller today. It was still a scramble to get up though and I needed a local guide to show the way or, at least, that's what he told me. Today I disapprove of myself for doing this as it obviously damages the pyramids to have tourists clambering all over them which is why it is not allowed, but still the view from the top across the great desert under the burning Egyptian sun was quite stunning. 

I like to imagine that there are three pyramids because of the triplicities to be found throughout nature, not least in the spirit, soul and body constitution of the human being. In this parallel Menkaure's pyramid would probably refer to the body as it is the last built and the least important. But it is still part of the whole and not to be discounted by any means.

The pyramids and the Sphinx belong to a world which is not ours in any sense at all. But they impress us as representing something profound and true. They speak to us from across the millennia, calling us back to something important we have forgotten. How many millennia? Official Egyptology puts it at around four and a half but then the water erosion on the Sphinx implies that at least to be much older, maybe even dating back to the end of the last Ice Age which was around 9,700 BC. Curiously, Paul Brunton writing in 1935 also thought the Sphinx was much older than established academic sources allow. He says that to "the Fourth Dynasty Pharaohs the Sphinx was already unutterably aged", and that those regarded as building it merely restored it. He relates a vision he had while contemplating the Sphinx at night "of men with long and hard faces and reddish brown skin" carving out the monument and then how after centuries had gone by and the men had long departed a huge wall of water swept over it. The Deluge! 

                                 The Sphinx with the Menkaure Pyramid in the background

Does the Sphinx date back to before the Flood? The water erosion evidence does appear to support that. All I can say is that when I first visited it in 1978 it did not seem at all far-fetched that it was many thousands of years older than recorded history, even ancient history. There is something about it that belongs to an epoch when the gods were still present on Earth which means a time when spirit and matter had not separated and the radiance of eternity still illumined the world.

Anthropocentric Spirituality

 A spirituality that sees mankind as central, one that is focussed on human beings and their spiritual development rather than God, is very common nowadays. It practically always goes with a generalised leftist attitude and fails the litmus tests proposed by Bruce Charlton which examine an individual's discernment and ability to see what is actually happening in the world today. It seeks personal benefit here and now in the form of an increased sense of well-being and peace rather than to put the soul right with God on his terms and irrespective of what that might bring as regards pain and suffering to the individual. It is really a form of psychological therapy rather than true religion.

The word sacrifice means to make holy and is etymologically related to sacred. Humanistic spirituality is not sacrificial but sacrilegious in that it attempts to steal sacred things that by right belong to God and appropriate them by the self on the human level. It pursues the religious path for what it can get from it, from a desire for heaven rather than a love of God. This false motive corrupts the entire spiritual approach so even if such a person engages in traditional spiritual practices such as prayer or meditation or ritual of whatever sort the work is tainted. This does not mean it won't bring results or that the results may not seem to them to be authentic spiritual experiences, but they will be empty of real spiritual benefit and merely feed the ego.

The desire for spiritual experience is understandable but should quickly be outgrown. We do not come to Earth to have spiritual experiences but to learn and so, generally speaking, such experiences will come to the seeker at the beginning of his journey to give him encouragement and the sense that what he aspires to really does exist but thereafter he may not be favoured. To seek to repeat past experiences is the sign of a spiritual sensualist.

Human-centred spirituality is actually an aspect of materialism. It is the spirituality of the materialist, a person whose whole mindset is formed by materialism and whose motivations relate to the earthly self and the satisfaction of its goals and desires but who has simply broadened his horizons to include a wider range of experiences. He is seeking to be fed and wants to bring the spiritual down to his soul rather than take his soul up to the spiritual. The first commandment will always be to love God with all your heart and all your mind and all your soul. Anthropocentric spirituality is the spirituality of the world.

The Humanitarian God

I had a conversation recently with someone about religion. I had said how odd it was that the local town council here in the south of England had hoisted a blue and yellow flag on top of their offices. I was referring to the way we have all been swept up in a wave of emotion and speculating on why this may be. I was not belittling the suffering of people caught up in war but questioning the attitude of those who seem to care deeply about this because the media tells them to but ignore similar things which occur all over the world all the time in greater or lesser forms. 

But the person to whom I was talking took a different approach. "I thought you were a religious person and yet you don't seem as upset as most people about the terrible human suffering in Ukraine. Surely anyone who believes in God should be concerned about relieving human suffering?" This attitude seems to encapsulate so much about the materialistic attitude to religion (shared by many believers not just the attitude of non-believers) that I thought I might address it in a post here.

What is the purpose of religion? Is it to make people happy and comfortable in this world or is it to prepare them for the next? Is it to relieve suffering or is it to understand suffering? Now, obviously it is important to relieve suffering where one can but that is not the main issue from a spiritual perspective. Nothing I say here should be taken as refuting the simple fact that we should always seek to heal wounds when we are able to do so but there are deeper matters to consider. Relieving physical suffering is clearly a noble act but it should not be used as an excuse to obscure spiritual understanding.

If you believe in God, really believe in a spiritual God, then you have a different attitude to the world and to human beings. Human beings then become not what they appear to be in the phenomenal sense but souls with a spiritual purpose and in need of spiritual development. They are not just minds and bodies as we would ordinarily perceive them. They are spiritual beings and that puts them in an entirely different light. To fulfil them in the earthly sphere might have a detrimental spiritual impact. That does not mean you turn a blind eye to suffering but that the real significance of life lies elsewhere. It lies in developing first an awareness of and then a relationship with God and with God as a spiritual being, seeing yourself as a soul not the incarnated personality.

Most people live entirely in the world of appearance. They identify themselves with their outer being, their human body, emotions and thoughts, and when they think of God they think of him interacting with this person or saving this person. Even many, maybe the majority of, religious people materialise spirituality in that they think the earthly human being is what matters. But the earthly human being is inherently and by default a sinner, and a sinner can only be saved by renouncing his sins and not just his sins but his identification with himself as an earthly human being. The earthly human being can never get to heaven. This needs to be understood. You only get to heaven, which is to say fulfil your divine purpose and destiny, by transferring the focus of your being from the earthly self to the spiritual soul. If you don't know what this means you are a materialist whatever your beliefs.

God is not a humanitarian. At least, not in the sense we normally understand the meaning of this word. That is because although he loves the whole human being there is a hierarchical dimension to this love and he loves the soul more than the body. This is not to discount the body but to put things in perspective. It is good to feed and heal the body but not at the expense of the soul and if the focus on the body is used to obscure the reality and prior claim of the soul then you are not acting in a godly fashion. It is hard to escape the sense that in recent times the humanitarian impulse, in itself a true and noble impulse, has been twisted and is being used to advance an attack on deeper spiritual values.

Current Events

I have never written much about current events on this blog except in a general manner. That is not what it is about. However, when events in the outer world have a spiritual import I need to sit up and take notice. Of course, in a certain sense they always do but they are doing so increasingly now. The tragicomedy of the last two years was one instance and the war in Ukraine is another. In both cases almost everything we hear from official sources is a lie, either an outright lie or a distorted truth, and meant to promote a certain agenda. On one level that agenda is to create a world of masters and slaves which is why the powers that be are busy destroying their own cultures, which has already been done, and economies which is in the process of being done. The spectacle of people participating enthusiastically in their own demise with regard to matters such as mass immigration, action to prevent climate change and now sanctions which hurt the sanctioners as much as the sanctioned would be absurd if it weren't tragic. The intellectual and emotional manipulation of the populace seems to be pitifully easy. Is this because we are no longer trained in critical thinking but just told what we should be thinking? Is the desire for acceptance so much greater than the desire for truth?

If the outer aim is to reduce the majority of human beings to a serf-like condition, those that survive a probable culling anyway, there is a spiritual dimension to all this too and that is ultimately the more important. Our Western civilisation is in the process of collapsing, aided and abetted by its leaders, and we are being encouraged into going along with ideologies and measures that will bring this about. I have mentioned  mass immigration and climate change concern but there are a whole host of other things, great and small, which I don't need to detail as they are all to do with eradicating tradition and the past so that people have no connection to anything outside postmodern ways of thinking. To answer my own questions above, we go along with these things because we have lost touch with the spiritual dimension of life and therefore to anything real and objectively true. But the consequences of going along with them separates us further from spiritual reality. It embeds us more deeply into the fundamental spiritual sin which is rejection of God.

There is the globalist goal of supranational totalitarianism which is widely known though not yet grasped by the man in the street, and there is the demonic goal of damnation which is only understood by serious Christians though perhaps members of other religions are also alive to this in the context of their beliefs. The two goals are interlinked but the one we really need to take seriously is the latter. Events in the outer world have a twofold significance. They are used to move on the globalist agenda. Pestilence, real or imagined,war and rumours of war and famine are all helpful in this regard. Society is broken down so it can be rebuilt in the form those seeking control wish. This, of course, will be presented as an act of benevolence or else necessity. But beyond all that there is the demonic aim of the spiritual destruction of souls. It is on this that we should be primarily focused because the body lives for but a few decades but the soul can live forever. So, see all current events in the light of salvation and what your reaction to them might mean in that context.

Secular Materialism and the Feminine

How can we cleanse our minds, purging them of every aspect of secular materialism? This is the task that lies before us at the present time because this materialism is like a worm in the apple of the mind that will contaminate the whole thing unless it is removed completely. Unfortunately, all of us are corrupted by it to some degree as it is the water in which we have swum all our lives. It's the basic assumption to everything, how we are educated, our culture, high and low, and it drives our dreams and ambitions. It's all pervasive. Even most people who believe they believe in God are materialists with their religious beliefs sitting in an overall context of present day secular materialistic assumptions such as democracy, humanism, feminism, climate change concern and so on.

I mention feminism. Our current world is sometimes described as increasingly feminised but this doesn't just refer to the rise and spread of feminism over the last hundred years. It also describes the attitudes that prevail in contemporary society as a whole, over and above the roles of men and women. What does it mean?

A feminised society is one that no longer seeks truth or excellence. In line with general female motivation, it prioritises what is seen as safe, secure and equally nice to all. It wants what is most agreeable to most people without excessive challenge or discomfort. Consequently, it will never rise above mediocrity. Women seek to observe the status quo. It is men who take risks and break boundaries so a feminised society will seek security and conformity above all. Consequently, it will start to regress to a kind of childhood. These characteristics, excellent and necessary in a mother, are an ideal balancing corrective to the more masculine drive that seeks out truth and creates a civilisation. However, if they dominate as they are beginning to do now they infantilise and weaken and lead to a reversal of cultural achievement. 

The childlike condition that results might be regarded as spiritual in that it bears a slight resemblance to pre-agricultural societies that supposedly lived in harmony with the natural world in a state of peace and communal equality.  I have to stress supposedly since more recent, less ideologically driven, research has shown that to be mostly a fantasy. But even assuming it were true, societies of this kind remained just as they were for thousands of years. They never advanced until disturbed, and their spirituality was largely just an awareness of the supernatural. They had not begun to grow into a real knowledge of God, and the purpose of life in this world is to transform human souls from a state of passive participation in life into beings of creative love and power. In short, to make gods. This requires constantly aspiring upwards, reaching beyond the safe and what is acceptable and attainable by everybody in the society. It demands that we leave spiritual childhood behind and become spiritual adults which means abandoning the lowlands and climbing mountains. Like it or not, and many religious people won't, a truly spiritual attitude needs the pioneering spirit. A feminised society is one that stays in the nest and will never fly. 

It can easily be observed that both materialism and feminism arise at the end of a civilisation's lifetime. They seem to be signs of cultural fatigue and decay and arise from a loss of spiritual purpose, coming about when the creative impulse that forms a civilisation has worn out and it is living off its past achievements.

Duality is the basis of the manifested universe. It is the interplay between two opposing forces that brings about creation and drives evolution. After all, it could be said that Man only begins to know himself because of Woman (and vice versa). Therefore, to point to feminism as a sign of cultural collapse is not to criticise woman anymore than to condemn materialism is to condemn matter. Just as the devil doesn't lie outright so much as deform the truth, the problem here is that womanhood and the material have been taken out of place and made to usurp the role of that which they are intended to complement in the context of duality. They have been made to become, or try to become, what they are not resulting in disorder and spiritual chaos. The devil is not very imaginative. He always makes the same offer. Give me your soul and I will give you money and power. He's played his usual game with feminism and materialism and many people have made the exchange.

How do we grow out of this? By starting to take the teachings of Christ seriously. These are not adjuncts to the modern beliefs of the world, to the secular ideologies of materialism, as they often seem to be perceived nowadays. They completely replace these ideologies, showing those to be shallow impostures deriving from a false idea of the soul. Feminism is an offshoot of secular materialism but when the feminine is rededicated to the spiritual it is transformed and becomes a sacred vessel for the divine as with Mary. Similarly with matter. Just as with the soul itself, these things only find their true fulfilment when they give themselves over to God through Christ. Then they become holy things. At the moment they have been deformed by trying to be something they are not.

The Need to Cultivate Discernment

 To see through the current world scenarios is going to require increasing levels of spiritual discernment. Mere intelligence of the high IQ variety will not be sufficient, if indeed it ever was. There will be big lies and little lies and the former will be used to obscure the latter which may well turn out to be more insidious in the sense that a half truth is often more damaging than an outright lie. All this is happening now and we need to be finely attuned to the reality of God, as he is and in terms of what his desires and aims are for us, and the truths of the higher worlds to sort it all out.  Those who rely on ordinary brain power will be deceived. It is the light of intuition manifesting as spiritual discernment that is essential. If you don't have that make haste to develop it which you can do by prayer and meditation on God and the Word of God and the person of Jesus Christ.

The game is well underway. Plague, war, probable economic collapse are either here or coming in some form or another. These are not sent by God but the inevitable result of the abandonment of God. Of course, these things have happened throughout history but in the context of here and now they can be seen as the consequence of the warped nature of present day consciousness. Though not sent by God they can be used by him as tools of spiritual learning which, after all, is the only reason we are in this world. That is why we are here, to learn to become like God. It is why we leave the safety and security of the higher planes of being and come down to a world in which we must make choices and be active. It is the wrong choices made by many people over many decades which are leading to a future in which we will be challenged in ways modern humanity is not used to and which will potentially cause great suffering. The only way to surmount these challenges will be through the power of spiritual discernment which will enable us to sift truth from lies and then live according to truth. Those who don't do this will be led astray and fall into darkness. I refer to spiritual darkness which is not perceived as such by those who are blind to the light but the effect of spiritual darkness will spread to the material plane. It must do so.

It cannot be stressed too much that the current world situation demands that we grow spiritually and this has to be on an individual level. It is not a collective thing though should spread beyond the individual to the collective. But it must start in the individual to be real and what it requires first and foremost is the development of discernment and this is not just a matter of knowledge or even insight. True discernment is also a moral thing, arising from a heart that is oriented towards God for that, when you come down to it, is what morality actually is.

Spirituality and the World

 There are two mistakes the spiritually oriented person can make in his relationship with the world. The first is to get drawn into taking sides in worldly disputes. I am not talking about the conflict between good and evil. To take sides in that conflict is essential but sometimes we project good and evil onto worldly scenarios and forget that these are basically spiritual things referring to the spiritual plane and our relationship with God. That can and does spill over into the material world of creation but real good and evil are always rooted in the spiritual and when we think of them that is what we should be thinking of to make sure we are approaching them as they actually are and not as we might imagine them to play out based on worldly priorities and criteria. 

The second mistake is to have no relationship at all with the world. This is the typical error of a certain category of mystic, the sort who forgets that though we should not be of the world, we are in it and cannot ignore that basic fact. To be born into this world means we have a task to perform here, and although that task might be to reorient both the world and ourself to the spiritual plane it is not to reject and deny the world as the arena of God's creation. If God looked at what he had created and saw that it was good who are we to say otherwise?

It can be a delicate balancing act. Our concern should at all times be the spiritual but the material is part of the spiritual as Jesus demonstrated when he took his body with him into heaven. He did not get involved with the world as the world but he loved it as the creation and sought at all times to render it more open to the spirit. This requires reorientation and purification and that also should be our attitude towards the world.

Nowadays there seems to be one crisis after another that clamours for our attention and demands we take a side. Increasingly, good opinion tells us there is a right side and a wrong one and we can be swept up into an emotional reaction or else just be fearful that we might be perceived as bad people if we don't follow everyone else. But I would suggest that often we don't have to take sides in other people's arguments. I am not saying we should stand back and let evil prevail but nor need we get involved in conflicts that fundamentally do not concern us. The immediate problem every human being has to face is within himself and has to do with his relationship with God, but we often ignore that in favour of something external to ourselves which is fundamentally less demanding and can be satisfied with gestures. 

A Radio Interview

 I did another interview recently to discuss Earth is a School and more. This one was with Barb Crowley who presents Metaphysics: A View Through the Veil and we had an interesting and wide-ranging chat. All the details can be found here.

https://www.voiceamerica.com//promo/episode/136094