10 Years On

 This blog is now 10 years old, the first post here being on February 28th 2013. I don't suppose I thought it would last that long when I started it but it has because in a changing world with more and more spiritual challenges there still seem to be things to write about. It began as an extension of the book I wrote about my encounters with the spiritual beings I called the Masters in order to develop themes from that book and it has done that but it has also gone its own way over time. That means I hardly ever write about the Masters now, and it's true that I have not had any outer contact with them since 1999 so the title might seem redundant. However, I believe they lie behind many things I do write about. They themselves said that they sought to impress ideas on my brain but this would be on a spiritual and non-verbal level which has to be translated by my own mind so it does come from me in the form it comes out but often (not always, of course) the seeds are planted by them. I should add that I am sure they do this with many people, wherever there is a receptive mind. My case is by no means exceptional.

What I am saying is that the title still applies though in an indirect way. I did consider changing it to just my name to mark the ten year anniversary but what would be the point? It is what it is and may as well remain that. Besides, if there is anything that marks this blog out it would be my experience with the Masters. For new readers who aren't aware of that I would refer them to the books on the right or else to this post which is of a talk I gave a couple of years ago, but the essential point I wish to make here is that though it may seem we are on our own in this world, that is not the case. We are guided and supported by our spiritual teachers, Christians might call these guardian angels, and they are constantly trying to influence us for the good. But their object is to bring us up to their level, possibly so that we can perform the same function as they do for future generations, and so they cannot hold our hands as though we were spiritual babies. Now every serious believer is called to be a saint and saints have to learn how to suffer. They also have to learn to be completely single-minded in their pursuit of God, a single-mindedness that should come from love.

God is all around us but he also withdraws so that we are obliged to go up to meet him. That is, go up to meet him where he truly is. This effort to meet him on his own spiritual level will develop our spiritual faculties. It is the meeting with God that is the goal of all spiritual endeavour. The Masters are just staging posts on the greater journey, as is any spiritual teacher, but staging posts can be very helpful and sometimes you can't get to journey's end without them. Their goal, as implied above, is to encourage us to develop our own relationship with God and that has a twofold aspect. There is the relationship with God the Father, the transcendent Creator of Heaven and Earth, and there is also the relationship with the God who dwells within our own hearts. If you restrict yourself to just one of these aspects your spiritual development will be limited. Your path must encompass both to be true.

Many times over the past 10 years I have written that this is a time of testing. Of course, that is always the case in earthly existence but today the work of the past 2,000 years is coming to a head. You can tell this because at no other time has there been so little awareness of God. People have always sinned and behaved badly but the culture was always religious. No longer. Now even religion is not religious for the most part. But that is good because it means we are being forced back on ourselves. We must become spiritually self-reliant if we want to become spiritually mature. This doesn't mean every man is his own pope but every man must make his own connection to God. This is not an easy task because the fallen self within us constantly gets in the way but making your own connection to God does not mean rejecting outside help in the form of scripture, religious teachings, whatever. It simply means not depending or relying on that outside help. Use it to illuminate your own soul. That is the proper goal of all spiritual endeavour.

Soul Music

I have been listening to Wagner's opera Parsifal recently. For those who are interested in such things it's the 1962 Bayreuth performance conducted by Hans Knappertsbusch, excellently recorded in stereo and featuring perhaps the last great generation of Wagner singers. I first heard orchestral extracts from Parsifal, specifically the Prelude and Good Friday music, in my early 20s but didn't listen to the whole opera until much later. I couldn't really get on with the singing and seeming longueurs then but now if I listen to Wagner it's the operas as a whole I listen to, the Ring cycle, especially Das Rheingold and Die Walkure, being my favourite with Parsifal a close second. No one can plumb the depth of Jungian archetypes like Wagner, almost literally so with the prelude to Das Rheingold. There is a spiritual intensity to his music which is quite different to the spiritual quality of, say, Tallis or, different again, Bach because it includes much more than these of the human element though less of the purely spiritual, as is only appropriate for Romantic music. You might say it goes deeper but is less elevated. Those who don't believe that human consciousness has evolved should study Western music of the last 1,000 years. From the pure simplicity of Medieval plainchant to the intricate  harmonies of Renaissance choral polyphony through the more expressive and technically sophisticated Baroque and Romantic music and on to the 20th century when it all broke down there is a clear progression with ever greater emphasis on self-consciousness. Wagner brought this to a pinnacle. After him there didn't seem anywhere left to go except for music to turn in on itself and we are still struggling with that problem. The composer Cyril Scott in his book Music: Its Secret Influence Throughout the Ages wrote that Wagner touched the buddhic plane, meaning a plane of high spiritual quality, on two occasions in his music, once with the Good Friday music in Parsifal and once with the Prize Song from The Mastersingers of Nuremberg. One doesn't have to express this in his Theosophical terms to recognise that these two pieces of music genuinely do have a spiritual quality like few others.

This is real soul music. It has always seemed ridiculous to me that what is called soul music is so called. Maybe it's a kind of inversion typical of these latter days since music of the soul is precisely what this kind of music is not. Soul, as in sensitivity to spirit and the higher dimensions of being, is just what is lacking here. It may be enjoyable music on its own terms but those terms are of physical being with input from the emotional level, not spiritual in any proper sense at all. Real music of and from the soul inclines to contemplation not sensual movement. The feelings it arouses are to do with reverence, majesty, awe, humility and the sublime not frenetic excitement of mind and body. It may be that not all people are capable of feeling these, let's call them what they are, higher feelings but it is a spiritually fatal mistake to pretend that the lower is the higher or that the two are in any way equal. They are not and if you don't recognise this you will desensitise yourself to higher reality. It's no good saying everything has its place unless you see the lower in the light of the higher. Sometimes, often, that will put it in a very different light from how it sees itself.

Spiritual and Material

  The spiritually inclined person can take one of several approaches towards this world. The extreme mystic can reject it altogether claiming all truth is in spirit and everything else is illusion but in doing this he is taking a very limited approach because he is restricting reality to one aspect of it, formless being. That may be the most fundamental part of it (it may not, we don't actually know) but this does not mean everything else is without meaning. Moreover, everyone who claims this in theory is inconsistent in practice. If you really believe this you may as well kill yourself now. You would also ignore crime, violence, murder etc, seeing them as nothing more than transient ripples on the surface of eternity. It turns out, when you analyse this approach, it is really a rather self-centred one. One, moreover, that denies the reality of God other than as a synonym for pure consciousness. Not to mention the goodness of creation or any purpose to existence beyond simply existing. As for good and evil, what's the difference?

The opposite of this is the person who claims religious or spiritual belief but interprets that in a worldly context. He seeks validation and/or fulfilment in the framework of this plane of being and for himself as he is here and now. Thus, he may either be a loyal and unquestioning member of a church (an earthly body) or he may look to spirituality to bring him peace and happiness in this life, spirituality as therapy rather than self-transcendence. Neither of these people understand that the spiritual has to do with the well-being of the soul not the earthly individual. They are not the same. Sometimes they are almost opposites.

The right attitude to take to this world is to see it in the light of the spiritual world. This means it is important as an expression of the spiritual world but not ultimately important. And yet it is part of the totality of life and has significance in that respect. The two are intertwined even if there is a hierarchal relationship between them. The material is an aspect of the spiritual and feeds back into it so what happens in this world matters - no pun intended. At the same time, the material has no true significance in and for itself.

When Christ died he showed that the material was not important for itself. But when he ascended into heaven he took his resurrected body with him and showed that the material was important as the vehicle through which spirit is glorified and can express itself. The proper attitude to this world and to the body (they are more or less the same thing) is to see them as the physical manifestation of divine being. As such, they are real but they exist to serve the purpose of divine being not for their own purpose or fulfilment. They are part of the wholeness of life, not illusion, not evil, not corrupt, not false, but they can become all of those things if they become detached from proper orientation towards spirit.

The One Deadly Sin

 I have been thinking about sin and what it is today because while we still acknowledge most of the traditional sins, pride, greed, lust, envy, anger, sloth and gluttony, we fail to recognise the deadliest sin and this is the one that is more prevalent now than ever.

There are sins of action, robbery, murder, rape and the like, and these we continue to regard as sins though we may not use that word any more. Then there are sins of desire and emotion such as anger and envy and these we often excuse unless they have real world outcomes that lead to crime or violence. And then there are sins of thought and the only ones of these we recognise now are those that go against the ephemeral fashions of the moment and are called racist, sexist, fascist etc. None of those were traditionally regarded as sins unless they included in their make up a real sin, pride or envy, for instance, or else real hatred. However, there is a real sin of thought, a spiritual sin, and this is not only not regarded as a sin but can even be seen as a positive thing, a virtue almost. At worst it has a neutral significance.

This sin is rejection of God. The rejection of God is more than unbelief. Unbelief nowadays is generally a passive thing but rejection is active. It is a deliberate denial of God not simply a lack of belief in him. I would say that even passive unbelief is a sin because God is real and if you are not for him you are against him but it is a sin that can be forgiven, assuming repentance and acceptance, of course. But the fully conscious calculated rejection of God is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit and that, so we have been told, cannot be forgiven.

I have labelled this post under free will because that is what all this is about. We are sent to this plane of being because here our innate tendencies can be brought out and this is especially true at the present time which, I would surmise, is why so many souls are alive now. This is a unique testing period in human history. Only those who actively choose to accept God will pass the test.

Unbelief Posing as Belief

 I got into trouble the other day because I described someone as an atheist. "She's not an atheist" I was told, "She believes in God". I didn't pursue the subject but what I thought to myself was "No, she doesn't, she only thinks she does."

What I meant by this was that this person, like so many, believes she believes in God because in her mind she thinks that God might exist and she would like God to exist though on her terms. But she doesn't really believe. Her behaviour is not that of a person who takes into consideration what the existence of God might actually mean. She doesn't have any kind of inner connection to the reality that is God. God is not  more real to her than this world. Worldly culture influences her far more than spiritual reality does. Her belief in God is actually a form of humanism with a small serving of God on top. He might be the cherry on the cake but he's not the whole cake.

The Pharisees thought they believed in God but they didn't. They believed in a construct of their own making not the living God at whose glance angels tremble (in love and awe not fear). The bishops in the Church of England think they believe in God but the only conclusion one can draw from their actions and words is that most of them don't. These people believe in the human race and they like to think there is some sort of spiritual component in humanity but they don't behave as if they have any understanding of the truth of God. If you don't have any understanding of God what is it you actually believe in?

To believe in God requires that you take God as the foundation of everything else you believe. He is not one ingredient among many. Everything else is seen in the light of that reality and is subsidiary to it. It also means you must have some understanding of what God is, how he expresses himself in creation and what he requires of you personally and human beings collectively. You might ask how can any mere mortal understand God? Obviously you can't completely but you can insofar as a human being can. He exists within your heart and will make his presence known to you if you listen properly, look correctly and remove, as far as possible, preconceived ideas and wishful thinking. You can understand God if you look at yourself in his light but never if you look at him in your light.

So, yes I would say that many people might intellectually acquiesce to the idea of God but they don't really believe in him. Of course, a lot of these people would feel insulted if you told them this but if they were honest with themselves they would see the justice of it. The problem for them is that until they see the truth of the accusation they will remain in illusion, thinking they have put themselves right spiritually while in fact they are as far away from the truth as any regular atheist. 

You only really believe in God if that belief overshadows, indeed determines, every other belief you have.  And nowadays if you say you believe in God but still go along with the worldly agenda, much of which grew out of the specific denial of God, then frankly you are no different from a non-believer. We live at a time of not just materialism but the assimilation of religion and spirituality to the materialistic ethos with the consequences that many of those who would call themselves believers fail to realise that believing in God means rejecting all the trappings and priorities of this world. Seeking to serve two masters they simply become absorbed by the world. Just like the bishops of the Church of England are demonstrating at the moment.

You must believe in the head and you must believe in the heart. If it is just the former then what you believe in is not God. It is only an idea you have about God and that idea will be formed from things other than God, very often things of this world - just like the bishops of the Church of England are demonstrating at the moment.

Astrology is a Signpost to Creation

 Anyone who makes even a half-serious study of astrology will find that the horoscope provides an accurate description of its subject. It's a system of symbols and has to be interpreted in context for the fullest understanding but creative analysis of the chart of the sky at a person's birth will always give insight into the nature and character of that person. No doubt the destiny too but I haven't investigated that side of things. I have looked at many horoscopes from the psychological perspective though and everyone one of them has given an accurate description of the person. In one case I even went back to someone to check if he had given me the right date because chart and personality didn't tally though they did for the year before. It turned out that this person had indeed been born the year before he had said. (I think this was an error on his part rather than a test). When my children were born I made a special case of noting the exact time so I could do the most accurate horoscope possible. This is because it is not just the date and place that matters but the time which is especially significant from the point of view of points on the horizon and zenith, Ascendant and Midheaven in astrological speak, the former indicating  the way you present yourself to the world and the latter showing your direction in life. I studied the horoscopes before I knew the personalities of the children and they have proved extremely accurate. I understand things about myself much better from knowing my birth chart. I believe it would benefit everyone to study their horoscope. They would have a good insight into their character strengths and weaknesses.

In Western astrology every sign of the zodiac, signs being the constellations which serve as the backdrop against which the sun, moon and planets move in the course of a year, is said to be ruled by a particular planet. This is because sign and planet share similar qualities. Thus, Aries was traditionally ruled by Mars, Taurus by Venus, Gemini by Mercury, Cancer by the Moon, Leo by the Sun, Virgo by Mercury, Libra by Venus, Scorpio by Mars, Sagittarius by Jupiter, Capricorn by Saturn, Aquarius by Saturn and Pisces by Jupiter. If you know anything about astrology you will see that some of these make sense and others not so much. You have to perform some mental acrobatics to make them fit. The reason is that there are 12 signs but only 5 planets plus the sun and the moon which are counted as planets for these purposes, a planet in astrology really being something that qualifies and represents a certain energy or, in human psychological terms, character trait. When Uranus, Neptune and Pluto were discovered they were assigned certain qualities which, it was found, fitted much better with the signs Aquarius, Pisces and Scorpio, and this isn't just arbitrary. Astrological practice shows it works. By the way, the discovery of these planets coincided with certain changes and developments in human consciousness so here we can see how astrology is a living system with room for growth.

This leaves two planets with a double rulership which implies that there remain two planets waiting to be discovered, perhaps again coinciding with changes in consciousness. These could either be very far out on the edge of the solar system or very close to the sun.  They could even be planets which are not fully materialised. It seems obvious that Gemini and Mercury go together but Venus has affinities with both Taurus and Libra so that is harder to decide. On the other hand, Virgo seems unlikely to be ruled by Mercury. The two have little in common so I am sure this is one of the signs that awaits its true ruler. That may be the planet known by esoteric astrologers as Vulcan, a so-called veiled or hidden planet. I am undecided about the 12th sign and its true ruler though I expect those more learned in astrology than me have their ideas.

All this indicates that astrology is still a work in progress. New ways to analyse the chart are always being developed and tested but there are also new astronomical factors astrologers take into account such as the minor planet Chiron. This is not an anything goes approach because everything has to work. Nothing is arbitrary. But we are dealing with a wisdom encoded into the structure of the universe and it would be very foolish to think we have uncovered all its details.

Many Christians reject astrology as a fundamentally irreligious practice. This is a mistake though perhaps understandable given the human tendency to lapse into superstition and fatalism. Astrology is certainly not a religious practice nor any kind of substitute for proper religion but it is an excellent tool for looking at creation and understanding the psyche, and if regarded in the light of the Creator has many positive contributions to make to human development. Astrology is a signpost to the fact of creation.

Hope Is Trusting God

 It didn't seem so at the time and it might not seem so now but I believe we can say that the globalist attempt to take over the world that came into full force in 2020 and went on through the next couple of years was a relative failure. To be sure, the great majority of people submitted to the propaganda and accepted the yoke but a substantial minority did not. They didn't believe the lies, they didn't don the facial costumes and they didn't offer their arms up to be stamped. This minority may have been bigger than it appears because they are not reported on by mainstream media, other than very occasionally and then in terms that deride them as idiots, but they supported each other online and so knew they were not alone.

It is this minority that has protected the whole of humanity. Some were quite public in their pronouncements. These were usually people who had some professional knowledge or else those who had insight into the lies and manipulation of governments and other public bodies, knowing that all of these have been captured by powerful vested interests that work against freedom. We owe a debt to these people. Others acted for spiritual reasons and though these are not publicly prominent in  any way their thoughts go out into the world and have a fertilising effect on minds ready to receive truth. You might think of the mental world as a great cloud of images. The more people that focus on a particular thought, the more that thought becomes defined and accessible to other minds that may be reaching out in a certain direction. It is given stronger form and brought closer to the earthly level. 

The attempted coup in 2020 was only a partial success for the globalists. I call them that for want of a better term but they are the body of men and women operating in the physical world who seek to curtail human freedom for their own ends, sometimes to do with money and power but not exclusively so because what these people are really doing whether they know or not, and most don't, is working for discarnate powers whose goal is damnation. What I mean by that word is the spiritual consequence of the human rejection of God. Souls who fall into this unhappy state then provide energy on which the demons, these evil powers and intelligences, can feed. Demons have cut themselves off from God and the true spiritual. They cannot get life energy directly from God. To continue in existence they must therefore steal energy from elsewhere and this is why these fallen beings seek to draw weaker souls into their power through spiritual corruption. This is their ultimate end game. It is why they do not at the moment seek total collapse and destruction. The risk then is that souls turn to God but if they can keep people clinging to the physical while rejecting God and calling good evil and evil good, as we now do to a greater extent than ever before, their goals are well served.

Nevertheless, it appears that more and more people are beginning to wake up from the bad dream of the last three years and realising that this was an orchestrated attempt to enslave humanity. It nearly worked but it didn't work as was hoped because too many people saw through the lies and spoke up about it. Now, the problems with the peck are becoming harder to hide because of the excess deaths figures. The fact that the illness for which the peck was supposed to offer protection was nowhere near as bad as was painted is also becoming better known, and the home imprisonment tactic, which only worked in the first place because so many people actively enjoyed it not suspecting where it might lead, is also being shown up as harmful on many levels from economic to psychological. Not forgetting that it didn't work as a barrier to disease anyway.

However, though the globalists may not have had quite the success they wished for and though their lies are gradually being revealed, they have more tricks up their sleeves. The two main ones they are running at the moment are to do with the hysteria concerning changing weather patterns and dragging the Western world into a war which really has nothing to do with it. Again, we are being fed lies and again there is practically no mainstream publicity given to views that conflict with the official one. I suppose this could only happen because of the corruption of education over the last few decades as people are taught what to think not how to think. I'm almost embarrassed to write such a cliché but it's a fact. There is also the feminisation of thought that has taken place with feelings regarded as more important than truth and harm avoidance and equality the principal aims of policy. More clichés, to be sure, but also more facts.

If I were asked whether I am optimistic or pessimistic about the future I would say both. Despite the relentless propaganda there remains something in the human soul that is oriented towards the true good which is God. In most people this lies dormant but it is there waiting to be woken. Having said that, I don't see the mass of humanity waking up but this is a time of the testing of souls. Those who make the grade will go on to higher worlds. Those who fall short will find themselves in planes of being that correspond to their own consciousness but I believe even most of these will be given new opportunities. A soul is only truly lost when it makes a definitive and permanent decision to reject God. Until that happens there is always hope.