Some Books

 I won't be posting here for a couple of weeks so this is one of my occasional reminders of the books that don't appear on the right hand side, the first of which are collections of posts compiled from the two blogs I have been involved with.

The Spiritual Crisis of Modern Man comes from 2019. It comprises essays from this blog, sometimes expanded a bit, arranged thematically. There is more detail here.

Albion Awakening was published in 2020. This was a collaboration with John Fitzgerald based on the blog we shared with Bruce Charlton which delved into the mystical aspects of the British Isles. Details are here.

In addition to these there is my new book By No Means Equal which will be published in October. More about that here.

Give Them Your Mind and They Will Take Your Soul

 We live today in a spiritually sick society with every tradition undermined and every institution infiltrated by forces bent on destruction. It's right to reassess tradition in the light of contemporary consciousness but very foolish to do a 180 degree turnaround from it without fulling understanding it, and we don't. We just denied the reality which tradition was trying to express. We could have changed the language somewhat but kept the meaning behind it or even gone more deeply into that meaning but our intellectual pride was such that we failed to look beneath the surface of past ways of thinking.

As for our national institutions, once the process of infiltration had reached a certain stage there was a tipping point. That took place around the turn of the millennium after which time the mission became to carry through the new ideology rather than serve the best interests of the nation. Those who rose to the top in such circumstances were the ones who were most comfortable with the agenda or least hesitant to submit ambition to moral scruples. Of course, they employed and promoted like-minded people.

The rejection of tradition and the destruction of institutions built up over, in some cases, centuries, did not happen by chance. It was not simply a matter of organic change but deliberate subversion. Every Western country was affected in the same way at the same time and although it may seem as if this was simply how things turned out because of some fashionable -ism or the impact of the 1960s when class barriers tumbled and freedom and self-expression became the watchwords of the culture, that is not the case because these were only external manifestations of a spiritual revolution that was planned. When I use the word spiritual I do not mean it was good. I mean it came from non-material realms. It was all part of a demonic attempt to corrupt humanity and separate it from God, to present evil as good and blacken spiritual good as evil. This could be done because elements of real good could be taken out of context, promoted, exaggerated  and used to deny others aspects of good. If you deny the primacy of the spiritual then you can present material good as all that is required and what tends to spiritual good is dismissed as either irrelevant or even wicked because it conflicts with your material good.

The aim is control, both physical and psychological. One of the reasons the powers that be are trying to bring the era of cheap energy to a close is that they will have more control. Cheap energy gives freedom but when energy becomes expensive your individual freedom, certainly the power to exercise it, becomes much more circumscribed. Yet more important than this is control of thought. A tamed population does as it's told. This is why, starting from the 1950s, there has been this ongoing attempt to undermine men, especially men of a certain hue, and masculinity. Emasculate to control. This is why such things as feminism and egalitarianism are pushed so relentlessly with the newly invented sins of sexism and racism the worst thought crimes you can commit. It is important to realise that ideologies such as these do have, to quote Bruce Charlton, a "core insight of validity", this being the value of the free individual, each and every one. But the good in them has been deformed and made into an evil by being exaggerated and used to suppress other aspects of truth. A truth taken out of context and the area to which it applies and then applied to other areas in which it does not apply or not in the same way becomes a lie. But, because there is a certain truth nestling within the two ideologies just mentioned it is hard to argue with them as they are presented now on an either/or basis which is what the argument usually gets reduced to. You have to go above and beyond the good/bad dichotomy to find the truth about many things these days which is why we have to go outside both conventional traditional and progressive thinking to get anywhere.

What is the aim of this undermining of freedom and attempted control of thought? For some in the outer circles it may be power but for the real instigators of the process it is the separation of Man from God. Spiritual not political. This is why there are so many contemporary movements that seek to rewrite the reality of creation. Dismantle creation and you do away with God to an even greater extent than simply not believing in him. As long as you accept the natural rules of creation you retain some link to its Maker but when you no longer observe even these you have completely lost touch with reality. Then you can be moulded in whatever shape the demons who are behind all this wish. Give them your mind and they will take your soul.

Note: This is the third part of a short series.

What is Evil?

The Destruction of the West

Beekeeping in India

Here's a bit of light relief from the tone of the last couple of posts. We should, of course, be aware of what's wrong with the world but that should not blind us to the simple pleasures of life. These are the things that remain when the storm has passed.

During my time running a small guesthouse in South India in the 1980s I met several interesting people who would come up to the hills where our guesthouse was situated to escape the heat of the plains in summer. The seasons in South India are hot, hotter and hottest and, just as the British at the time of the Raj had retreated to places like Simla in the north and Ootacamund in the south (they have different names now but I'm sticking with tradition), so Europeans in India at the time I was there sought cooler climes at certain times of the year. No doubt they still do. We were 5,000 feet above sea level which was regarded as providing an ideal climate for the latitude. Locals were proud that you could grow mangoes and strawberries in the area, two fruits not normally found growing in the same place. Other products were coffee, avocados, guavas, oranges and bananas. There was also pepper and rubber.

I mention these plants because while I was there I became interested in beekeeping. There was a regional beekeepers cooperative which I joined. See if you can identify me in the group photograph.

Yercaud Beekeepers Cooperative 1982

I never had that many hives but I kept a few in the compound (i.e. garden) of our property, and one of the things I soon learned was that the taste of the honey would vary depending on which plants were in bloom. The flowers of the coffee plant in particular gave a distinctive taste to the honey and this was very noticeable because Yercaud was a coffee growing district (as Ooty, at a slightly higher elevation, was a place for tea) so there were times when the coffee was flowering that the bees went for that and nothing else. Rubber also had a strong signature. The Ayurvedic practitioners in the district would recommend different honeys for different ailments but I'm not sure how scientifically valid their theories were. I do know, however, that honey is a good disinfectant as it has anti-bacterial properties and helps in the healing of wounds.

Me with flowering coffee plants. The tie was a present.

My colleagues in the cooperative were mostly peasant farmers though there were a few higher caste people there too. Beekeeping brought them together in a way not much else did though I did notice that the hierarchy was still observed, albeit not in an unpleasant way. For instance, in the photo above the high caste people are all in the front row. The chap in the middle with the sunglasses was, as he seems, the local bigwig. He was actually very friendly to me but he made sure everyone knew he was the boss though of what I'm not sure. He was a Syrian Christian which is one of the oldest forms of Christianity in the world, dating back to the time when St Thomas, the doubting apostle, came to Kerala in the south west of India and preached the Gospel converting many of the local population, Brahmins among them which is very unusual. So Christianity has existed in India for nearly 2,000 years.

Members of the cooperative would go out into the hills in search of swarms and while on the hunt caste was set aside, all working together. I was told that the peasants were never stung. The reason was that they never washed with soap so they smelt as nature intended. Bees don't like soap, it seems. I myself did use soap but I was only stung a few times as the bees in our area were mostly gentle types who wouldn't sting you unless you really startled them. I never wore any protective equipment. Nobody did. I was taught how to put my hand, slowly, into a nest of bees and just let them cling to it after which you would gently shake them off into your collection box. As long as you had the queen the rest would follow. I can tell you the first time I did this I was pretty nervous but thought I'm representing the British here, I can't let the side down, and went ahead.

Our equipment at that time was very simple. The hive was just a wooden box into which slotted several frames. You would put your bees in there and they would build up their wax honeycombs on the frames. When you extracted the honey you would take great care not to damage the combs because it would take the bees a lot of time and energy to rebuild them, time and energy they would otherwise be putting into producing the honey which you hoped to steal from them. It's a cruel world.

The machine we used to extract the honey was cleverly designed. Essentially a metal drum or cylinder, you would place the frames full of honey in spaces on the inner part of the drum. Then you would turn a handle on the outside that would rotate the drum at high speed and centrifugal force would throw the honey out into a container at the bottom from where it was collected. When the process was complete you replaced the undamaged combs back in the hive with a request to the bees to start all over again. This may seem like straightforward robbery but in the seasons when there were no flowering plants about you would feed the bees with a sugar water mix so that the colony could survive in the lean times. Of course, you only did this so you could exploit them again. Some people, I heard, would extract honey produced by the sugar water but this was regarded as very unethical besides which the resulting honey was not nice. Far too sickly sweet.

One summer we had someone from the Sri Aurobindo ashram in Pondicherry visit our guesthouse. We had actually had a few people from there before, Europeans and Americans who needed to take a break from the intensity of Indian life down in the plains. But this fellow helped run the ashram canteen and that is why a few weeks later we found ourselves on a bus to Pondicherry with several 25lb drums of honey which we were delivering to the ashram on behalf of the cooperative.

To be continued.

The Destruction of the West

 To what extent is the current elite deliberately trying to destroy the West, specifically the Christian West, and to what extent is this simply a matter of false ideology and ignorance, short termism and even misplaced good intentions? For, make no mistake, the West is being destroyed. It is being destroyed by materialism, atheism, mass immigration, which is seemingly unstoppable, feminism, which gives a whole new meaning to the traditional women and children first saying, moral relativism and several other movements and ideologies which any spiritually sane person can recognise and which are mostly interlinked and which result from the loss of the sense of the transcendent and the promotion of envy and resentment to virtues.

Just as there is a hierarchy of good so there is a hierarchy of evil. At the upper levels of this hierarchy there is intent, definite, deliberate, serious, cold, malevolent intent. At mid and lower levels, not so much, at least not so much in the sense of something planned and acknowledged. Some of these people may want to destroy but they tell themselves they are motivated by honest impulses to make a better world. No doubt there are elements of that in their psychological makeup but there are also strong feelings of anger and hatred plus the afore-mentioned resentment. They are co-opted by those at higher levels because of some personal moral defect or intellectual weakness or spiritual vacuity. They are unwitting servants of evil but they would not be co-optable if there was not this attraction to sin or spiritual blindness within them.

But we are all sinners so what's the difference? It is precisely this. Yes, we are all sinners but some of us recognise this and struggle against it while others allow themselves to be defined by it. These people justify, excuse, even celebrate their sin. They identify with it and do not allow true spiritual feeling to reveal it for what it is. It is their treasure, their pet, rather than their burden, their pride rather than their shame.

Nothing in this world is 100% one thing. None of us are perfect and none of us are wholly bad. And yet, the world is moving in a direction in which the dividing line between sheep and goats, between those who, on the whole, wish to love and serve God, the truth, the good, however they might define it, and those who, in one way or another, serve the forces of anti-God, anti-truth, anti-good, is being drawn. Tests are underway. They examine our spiritual responses to situations and ideas, but be careful of that word spiritual. It does not necessarily mean what we think it does, we who live in a decidedly unspiritual age. Thus, it is not universal loving kindness unless that is balanced with real love of real spiritual (as opposed to worldly) good. For instance, everyone would say that God loves us but what does he love?  Does he love us as we are or does he love the soul rather than the earthly personality? Both you say? Then does he love the murderer as murderer? This is an extreme example but it illustrates the point that though God loves the sinner he does not love the sinner as sinner. If the sinner will not let go of his sin he is separating himself from God's love. That will always be there should he repent and, for the sake of the soul, God will do what he can to bring that sinner to repentance but he cannot override free will.

Therefore, spiritual response means response to the reality of the world of the soul and to the values of that world. It does not mean treating the lower self as though it were the higher self but that is often the practice of worldly people, even self-defined religious and spiritual people, who lack understanding of that world and who misinterpret the truths of spirit by seeing them in the light of this world and its priorities.

The West is being destroyed, in part by deliberate plan, in part by ignorance, in part by greed, selfishness and so on. But also because its time has come. If that were not the case then the attempt to destroy it would not be succeeding as it undoubtedly is. For those who lament its passing, and I do, let me quote some words of my teachers from many years ago at a time when this process was certainly well underway but had not reached anything like its present state. They said "Nothing good, nothing true can ever be lost." When we see the destruction of goodness and truth in this world we are right to lament it but we should also remember that even this was but a shadow and pale reflection of that which inspired it and which remains inviolate in the higher worlds.

The West is under a ferocious attack by the powers of evil. This has been a long term operation, though it is coming to a head now, and for that reason people who only think in terms of human generations cannot see it for what it is. They think the desire for money or power is what motivates the corrupt elites. But these people are manipulated, their vices exploited, by supernatural powers which seek spiritual destruction and the separation of the soul from God. Only when you recognise this simple, basic fact can you understand what is going on in the world, especially the Western world, today. It is right to lament the destruction of the good but it is more important to hold fast to the vision of the divine. Our salvation never lay in this world.

Added note: To say that salvation does not lie in this world does not mean we should just accept the destruction of the good here. We should not but we should also understand that the real good is elsewhere and that will give us a proper perspective.

What is Evil?

 I've written about this before but I want to consider it again because the battle between good and evil is fundamental today. Of course, it always is but two things mark out the present time. One, the issue is confused, deliberately so, in a way it has not been before, and two, the lines are being drawn with each side becoming more defined, albeit in a way that is not immediately obvious to everyone.

What, then, is evil? The answer is simple. Evil is the rejection of God. That is it. Now, this takes various forms and manifests itself in a number of ways but the root cause of them all is that rejection. And the rejection of God is the rejection of truth because God is truth. Therefore, a God rejecter is a person of bad faith - literally. I realise this is a nasty thing to say in the context of the present day but trying to skirt round the edges of the problem just leaves it unsolved. If you deny God you are a bad person and you will do bad things and support wicked ideology. Perhaps at one time there were legitimate grounds for doubting the reality of God. Human consciousness had changed and a religion formed for the previous stage of consciousness was no longer sufficient for many even if the basics were still present. But now anyone of good faith should be able to see where the rejection of God has taken us and where it will take us. This should force any atheist or even agnostic to make a full reassessment of his position. A period of doubt is inevitable for most people in the modern world, and it's even healthy as it can lead to a deeper faith eventually as one reconsiders the nature of life, the self and the world and no longer takes religion on face value but penetrates beneath its surface. But that period should not be a destination. The healthy soul will move on to acceptance of divine truth. 

Why do I say this so confidently? Partly because God is in us and he will speak to us if we do not suppress his voice, and partly because a healthy soul seeks love, goodness and beauty and these cannot exist unless they are grounded in a God. Otherwise they are no more real than the appearance of a face formed by clouds would be. So either you accept these things are not real in which case anything goes or else you acknowledge their reality in which case you must acknowledge the existence of that which gives them reality.

Where has this rejection of God taken us? For a start, it has taken us to a world of post-truth. This had been creeping up on us for many decades but it took over around the turn of the millennium since when everything is said and done for appearance and effect. Very little simply because it is right. Recently we have seen that even science has become more a matter of consensus than truth, and as for politics, the least said the better.

Then it has taken us to the triumph of technology. Technology starts as the attempt to force Nature to human will which implies the prioritising of matter over spirit but then as it proceeds and develops it becomes the means to remake the human form changing it from being in the image of God to a self-created thing which, by definition, is a deformed thing.

All the various ideologies of the modern world which are supposedly humanistic are actually Satanic.  They are so because they reject God and try to recreate not only human society but even the human being (see above) in a form that has no need of God. The only conclusion to be drawn from this really quite obvious and undeniable fact is that modernism, the whole of it not just the more extreme parts, is evil. If that shocks you or seems excessive it is only because the full effects of the modernistic agenda have not yet been realised. But the steps to that end game have been and they are continuing to be taken. One leads to another and on we go to the inevitable conclusion though maybe there is no clear end, just a deeper and darker descent into spiritual loss and separation. In fact, there will be an end because God will not permit things to progress beyond a certain point but there is some way to go as most people are not yet fully corrupted.

To say that the whole of modernism is evil refers to its manifestation in today's world. It does not mean there was nothing good or necessary about the developments in human consciousness, largely to do with a greater awareness of self, that came about in the Western world and from there were exported and spread all over the globe. This was a spiritual advance but the energies behind it were captured and perverted by demonic forces, and the new sense of self instead of dedicating itself to pursuing divine mysteries became fixated on itself. God was rejected and into that vacant spot humanity put itself though it will find that actually what it has done is made itself the dupe of demonic forces. Now we have reached the point where to retain any aspect of modernism in any of the various forms that have come down to us is like not cutting out a canker from a plant. It will eventually spread over the whole plant, corrupting and killing it. Everything that the world believes today has to be reassessed in the light of the reality of God and his purpose for the soul. Absolutely everything.

Am I really saying in this article that people who don't believe in God are bad people? Don't we all know individuals who do not believe who are good, decent people not to mention those who do who are not? That is not the point. For a start, many people think they believe in God but they just subscribe to an image and are not awake in the heart which is where true belief is centred. That is what I am talking about here, and the test is do you see the world in the light of God or God in the light of the world? 

Then there is the further point that this is not about personal behaviour. It is about whether or not the heart is open to the source of truth and goodness. A heart that is so open is a good heart and will acknowledge God. One that is not so open is actually rejecting the source of goodness. How can you call that good? So you see it is not about whether you are good (which in the modern world means relatively tolerant and charitable and not much more) but whether you love good, actively love real spiritual good. Those who do will believe in God because one inevitably means the other. Those who don't love good will not believe in God. It's all about love. Genuine believers in God may behave badly. They shouldn't but they may. We are, after all, all sinners and repentance is an ongoing requirement. Those who reject God may lead outwardly exemplary lives but that is of small concern if their heart is turned away from their Creator. I repeat it is all about whether the heart is oriented to, open to, real goodness. Depending on circumstances, this need not take exactly the same form in all cases. I personally believe that many spiritual approaches contain pathways to God, not all but many, even if Christ remains the Way, the Truth and the Life and ultimately no one comes to the Father except through him. But people take different ways to get to him.

God is reality and God is good. If you reject God you reject the good in reality. That is evil.

A Funeral

 I went to a funeral yesterday. The deceased had had a long life and a distinguished career and was much loved by friends and family. It was a successful life well lived but he had been a religious sceptic up until nearly the very end. But not apparently at the very end. The canon who gave the address related how he had visited this man a few days before he died and they talked about the afterlife. Naturally, one's approaching end concentrates the mind and you become more open to things you may previously have dismissed. Their reality or otherwise is suddenly a matter of pressing importance. The canon said he had asked his friend, for they were friends, to imagine he was speaking to a baby just before it was born. What would he say? Something like this perhaps. "You are now in a dark, safe and secure place where your every need is met. You have nothing to do except to be and grow peacefully in silence. But very soon all that will change. You will come out into a world of light and sound and other people. You will change and form relationships. There will be challenges you will be required to meet and suffering too in all probability, but there will also be love, joy and fulfilment in various ways, for some more than others but for all there will be opportunity to make some kind of mark, great or small." How could the as yet unborn child understand any of this but if he could then might there not be excitement at the prospect? In the same way, said the canon, you are about to leave one form and phase of life for another. Your horizons will be hugely expanded in ways you cannot now envisage but, if you approach this change with hope in your heart and a faithful mind, all will be well.

I thought this was a good way of looking at things. After all, birth and death are two sides of the same coin. We come from mystery and at the end of our life we return to mystery. It's like the famous story told by the Venerable Bede in his account of the conversion of King Edwin of Northumbria of the sparrow that flies into a warm hall out of a wintery night and then out again at the far end of the hall. There is a great world outside the hall and the sparrow continues his journey. Likewise, we too are on a journey and death is but a stage on that journey, an important one to be sure, but still only a stage. It is not the end.

Apparently the dying man was reconciled at the end with the prospect of a new life in which he would meet his loved ones who had gone on before, and he ventured forth with a newly found hope in his heart. I believe in some kind of purgatorial purification after death so a simple shift of belief is but the beginning but I also believe that it is a necessary beginning and if we open our hearts to the reality of the spiritual life, even if that is only at the end as it was in this case, then we face towards the light and move in the right direction on the next stage of our journey.

Feminist Hypocrisy

 This is an article by someone who has burnt down the cornfield and is now surprised to find that nothing grows properly in it. Worse, she is using the situation to display her broad-mindedness and insightfulness and maybe even as a business opportunity. Unfortunately, she has no idea what she is talking about as she seems to think that men are just imperfect versions of women.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/jul/01/caitlin-moran-whats-gone-wrong-for-men-and-the-thing-that-can-fix-them

It is going to be increasingly noticeable that people who jumped on board with and eagerly participated in the dismantling of traditional wisdom are going to be shocked at the latest phase of that which they so eagerly pursued. How many of them will have the humility and wisdom to realise they have made a mistake, reassess their priorities and go back to basics as a result? Few, I predict. Most will just lament the most recent development but remain blind to what caused it as with the feminists who resist the transgender movement which is just a natural progression of their own ideology. They will be unable to see they have brought this about themselves. The leftists, the globalists, the feminists, the internationalists (no borders!), the materialists, the atheists and a whole host of other spiritual deviants will wring their hands and say this is not what we meant when it is the direct result of their thoughts and writings and words and actions. They will refuse to see the obvious, blinded by the shadows cast by their own egos. No one likes to admit having made a mistake, still less having propagated and promoted lies for their whole adult life. But unless they take the opportunity offered by being shown the consequences of their intellectual and spiritual errors they will not escape from the darkness of self-serving ideology into the light and freedom of truth. Sinners are forgiven but only when they repent, and repentance cannot be partial or conditional. It is all or it is nothing. Those who have built systems of thought and behaviour on the denial of God must wake up to what they have done and go back the whole way to the point at which their path deviated from divine reality. They cannot just retrace a few steps and try to preserve their error in an ego-saving manoeuvre which will do them no spiritual good at all. They must dig out the roots of the error or it will simply put forth new shoots.

Environmentalist Hypocrisy

 I mentioned to an acquaintance this morning, someone who is a signed up devotee of the Green religion, that if the Greens were really serious about saving the planet and looming environmental catastrophe they would immediately push hard for the banning of all immigration, legal, illegal, the lot. His head practically exploded and he flailed around trying to find a flaw in this argument which is based on the undeniable fact that people in the 1st world cause more damage to the environment, consume more, have a greater carbon footprint etc, etc, than those in the 3rd. His face got redder and redder (there's a clue there, isn't there, true colours revealed?) and he spluttered and mumbled but could only come up with the feeble irrelevancy that some rich people in the 3rd world have a greater environmental impact than poor people in the 1st. But when I replied this meant we should only allow rich immigrants into the 1st world and ban all poor ones it was all too much and he left the room.

I mention this just to show that a substantial percentage of modern environmentalists do not really love Nature, still less God who created Nature, at all. Far too many of them are motivated by those good old fashioned values of hatred and resentment. They want to destroy not create. But you knew that, didn't you? By the way, I write this as someone who doesn't drive, rarely flies and was a vegetarian for 25 years. I consume as little as possible and I would gladly see a vast reduction in our desecration of the natural world, use of plastic, pollution of air, earth and water and so on and so on. But I want to see this driven by love of God and creation not hatred of humanity.