Simplicity

To continue with the theme of the previous post:

Spiritual truth is simple but it is easy to get lost in philosophical speculations which lead nowhere.

One of the things the Masters never ceased to emphasise to me was that spiritual truth is fundamentally simple. That doesn't mean it is naive or childish or even easy to understand. But it is pure and good and therefore uncomplicated, and consequently available to anyone whose heart is open and whose thinking has not been led astray by fashionable beliefs of the day or intellectual mind games.

However while spiritual truth is simple it also requires a seriousness and a depth of insight sufficient to understand that its real purpose is not to make us happy in this world or reduce suffering here but to take us beyond ourselves and this world to something greater. That is why current notions of spirituality as in some way being about healing are so wide of the mark. Healing of the psyche can be a preliminary to proper spirituality but should not be mistaken for it. Some of the greatest saints have been those who have suffered the most, both in mind and body. They did not look for healing but for putting themselves right with God. They did seek self-improvement or self-fulfilment but tried only to love God more deeply and do his will more completely. What could be simpler than that? And yet what is further away from us today when so many people believe they can follow a spiritual path without acknowledging the Creator or their own sins, or act as if spirituality were really just another, more sophisticated branch of consumerism?

The simplicity of spirituality means that it is a path of the heart more than the mind (which however is not excluded) but this truth has become stale through repetition and lost much of its meaning. It does not mean that the way to God is through feelings centred on the self, as in relating to emotional reactions and attachments, but it is through deeper feelings which are more akin to intuitions reaching beyond our personal thoughts and desires to something more universal and fundamental.

However the problem with intuition is that we often interpret it according to our pre-existing prejudices and preferences. That is because what we call our intuition is still undeveloped and our personal mind is much the stronger element within the totality of what we are. Our task then is to follow the intuitive thread more fully and not obscure dawning insights with misinterpretations or even distortions of those insights. This requires strict honesty and the ability to look at oneself objectively.

So spirituality is simple but it is not about the joy or sorrow of the earthly self nor is it about healing that self unless this is taken to mean setting right its fundamental disorder.  But that can only be done by aligning the soul to truth which means God who is best conceived of as our divine parent.  This sounds too simple, even sentimental, to some but Jesus called God Father so who are we to disagree? We have to assume he knew what he was talking about and meant what he said. This doesn't mean that God is exactly like an earthly father but that fatherhood, cosmically considered, best defines his essential nature. Of course, we can also conceive of God as pure existence if we wish but if we are concerned with a God that acts, that is something more than unexpressed being, then we have to think of him as a person. This is the God in whose image we are made. It is the God we are called upon to know.

When Jesus told his followers that unless they became like a child they would never enter the kingdom of heaven, he was emphasising this need for open-hearted simplicity. But note he said like a child. He was not recommending a reversion to childish ignorance or juvenile behaviour but saying that a complicated, calculating mind was a barrier to true wisdom. At the same time, the mind is a major part of what we are and cannot be neglected or sidelined. It must just be coordinated to the higher understanding of the spiritual intuition, the direct knowing which comes when the heart is rightly orientated to God. Then it is fulfilling its proper function.

God is inherently simple because he is the One from whom comes all the profuse variety of created life. But it is the world that is complicated. God is simple, and yet in that simplicity there is everything. How can we know him unless we become like him?

Philosophical Speculation Which Leads Nowhere

God is often described nowadays as existing beyond being, and this is fine if you wish to avoid the error of reducing him to something in creation, to an object of consciousness or, indeed, anything that can be conceptualised in any way. Ultimately God is unknowable to anything but God, and he that is the essence of being must be regarded as beyond that as it is in human terms, which is to say as it is in creation. So God can be imagined as the divine darkness that is there before the light of creation or prior to the activity involved to bring about our existence. All good apophatic stuff. However there is a drawback to this description of God in that it tends to reduce him to an abstraction and to depersonalise him. It removes him from us when really he is closer to us than our hands and feet. Indeed, being the archetypal 'I' of our 'I-ness', he is closer to us than we are to ourselves. 

The Masters told me that spiritual truth is simple. They told me this when my natural human desire always to go deeper was in danger of leading me astray from a truly spiritual approach of the heart to a more intellectual one that sought to understand, and not just to understand but to capture understanding, to possess it for myself. Could it be that the desire for wisdom is sometimes rooted in the ego? Can it divert one from the true path to a head-centred approach that is all about ideas.  I think this can be so. Not that wisdom isn't essential  for us and a natural thing for us to want to acquire. We are created to know it. But the desire for it can be a trap that leads one away from the truth in its basic simplicity and down blind alleys into philosophical speculations which lead, if not nowhere, then certainly nowhere of a spiritually fruitful nature.

You can speculate all you like about the divine darkness of pure being but if, in so doing, you lose sight of the essential personhood of God you will remain outside spiritual truth.

Why Does God Allow It?

Further to my last post, there was a comment on Bruce Charlton's post (which inspired mine) asking why God allowed the demons to manipulate our world to the extent they do. Why are we left defenceless against their onslaught? What chance do we have?

I've put my thoughts on this question over on Albion Awakening.

Loss of the Soul

Does the ordinary person ever stop to ask himself or herself where humanity is heading? I believe many people must secretly be wondering this inside themselves, secretly because the current more or less enforced scenario is that we are progressing towards the sunny uplands of one humanity in which all differences have been abolished and we are free to make our own reality - as long as that coincides with the officially sanctioned version. That's the scenario but it really doesn't feel like that to many people. It seems more as if valuable truths are being lost and replaced by falsehoods designed to make us feel better in a superficial way but which actually lead us into illusion and darkness.

People are not fools, surely? Even with all the indoctrination that goes on nowadays through science, the media and education, all corrupt, there must be a significant number of people who see that this is ideological rubbish, mustn't there? Alarmingly, the number who really do see this and say so seems to be relatively small but still I do believe there are a sufficient number of people able to think for themselves (this is not necessarily a matter of intelligence or, at least, not as it is measured by IQ) and see through the propaganda.

We are being cut off from our past but a tree that loses contact with its roots cannot grow and will die. For us in the West our past is inextricably tied up with Christianity and it is the teachings of Christianity that are most under attack these days, whether it be the social teachings relating to marriage and family or the spiritual teachings relating to our origin and end being in God, the Creator of Heaven and Earth. There is, and I say this because it is so, a diabolical attempt to remake humanity going on at present, without reference to God or even spirituality except, when it suits the convenience of the dark powers, a spirituality that is mostly based on so called human potential. Our minds are being emptied of their real inner content and restocked with images from outside, images not based on nature but deformed, artificial, machine-like. We are increasingly dependent on machines and computers and consequently become more and more like them in terms of our consciousness which loses its innate freedom and vision to become a controlled product that reflects the false images it is fed. We are told our natural instincts are false, if not downright evil, and shamed if we hold to the beliefs about life and human beings that practically all past generations have held. The struggles of our ancestors to make the world a more spiritually intelligible place are belittled as attempts to impose power by one section of the populace over the rest, and past traditions are defined only by their errors or excesses disregarding the fact that these form a small proportion of the totality of what they were.

I was prompted to write this piece by a truly excellent essay by Bruce Charlton which is here. In it he talks of how the demons who manipulate our world are attempting to create a world without God, and sets out how they are going about this task which they have been preparing for centuries but which is really picking up pace in our time. This may sound like science fiction or wild conspiracy theory but it is very real, and should be increasingly obvious when we see the madness that passes for truth and goodness these days. Bruce's essay is a tour de force in my opinion and drew out the comment from me that the demons are aiming for the point where they will have created a real rupture between the earthly personality and the spiritual self with the result that their victims, who are us, will literally be soulless entities. The demons cannot destroy our true spiritual self for that is of God, but they can bring about a situation in which any connection we have to it is broken, and this is what they are attempting now, with spectacular success. They have prepared their ground very thoroughly over the last, say for the sake of argument, two centuries, but they have really upped their game since the 1960s, and now we have generations who have not only ceased to be Christian but no longer even have the benefit of an upbringing in which Christian values were still paramount.

Once the link between earthly self and spiritual soul really is severed we are lost. We have not reached that point yet but the signs are that we are approaching it. Then what I think will happen is not pleasant. It is a kind of self-chosen damnation but that does not necessarily mean terrible suffering as in traditional depictions of hell in paintings by Hieronymus Bosch, for instance. What will happen will be a gradual thinning of consciousness as it is no longer fed by the spirit, the connection having been lost by a voluntary turning away from real goodness and truth to inverted versions of these. Our awareness will become less alive, less sensitive and alert, the opposite to what happens in genuine spiritual growth, and gradually fade, becoming, figuratively speaking, two-dimensional and colourless. This will go on until eventually our consciousness falls below a certain threshold and we become creatures without freedom or true autonomy. It may then fade out altogether, actually cease to exist, or else the demons might preserve it somehow to serve their ends. This is not an appealing prospect but at no stage are we obliged to follow it. Our destiny is in our own hands. The demons cannot force us to do anything. They can lull us into materialistic sleep but only if we are foolish enough to let that happen. For goodness sake, wake up!

I understand that all this will seem ridiculous to modern people, raised in a materialistic world in which we are the result of purposeless evolutionary forces, but time presses. Your soul is yours to save or to lose.


Note: 
I've been asked if what I am saying here is similar to what David Icke is saying. I think it is similar but different. I only know his work indirectly but it seems he is talking about a political totalitarianism leading to material enslavement. Although he posits his famous demonic reptiles as orchestrating the show their motive is not spiritual enslavement or damnation as far as I understand things, though I may be wrong in that. What I see as the purpose of the dark forces is the separation of humanity from God and everything really revolves around that. The control they seek only has that purpose.  Moreover David Icke seems to regard Christianity as part of the problem, though he follows a vague spirituality, but, while I would agree that Christianity has certainly been corrupted, I see Christ as the only real bastion against untruth and spiritual darkness. Which is not to say that other approaches to the spiritual are not valid but they do not have the same degree of truth and validity.

Depression

According to this article in the Daily Telegraph almost 10% of the British population meet the criteria for depression nowadays, and the average age for the onset of depression is 14 years old as compared to 45 in the 1960s. Setting aside the fact that we know much more about this problem than in the past, when it would not have been so recognised, one has to ask what is it about the modern world that causes this? 

I am sure the professionals can come up with all sorts of reasons ranging from increased academic pressure on the young to consumerism to technology and so on and so forth. Probably people also have more time to be depressed now, and they expect more from life than our ancestors did. They see celebrities strutting across the stage of life and wonder why they can't be like them. This is particularly the case for teenage girls, I find. All these things are undoubtedly true and yet there is something more important that goes beyond them, and that is very simply the loss of God.

Depression relates to the absence of meaning. Yes, I know there may be physical problems that can also cause it but fundamentally it is the lack of meaning and purpose in an individual's life that results in a depressed attitude. Meaning and purpose can temporarily be found in many things but ultimately they reside only in the spiritual. When you deny the spiritual it is as though you have cut off the supply of blood to the heart. Eventually it ceases to function. Modern society has denied the spiritual and so it has denied meaning to life. There are no two ways about this. We can and do invent false meaning, through money, sex, fame, drugs, material success, political engagement and the like, but these don't take us very far and the artificial meaning they provide cannot be sustained for long. No wonder depression is on the rise.

Depression is also caused by fixation on the self. This is not a popular diagnosis but it is true. That is why old-fashioned remedies such as taking a walk or doing something for someone else make a lot of sense. But these are perhaps only short term solutions. There is really only one cure for depression and that is to turn to God. Depression is being trapped inside yourself. Only God can really take you beyond yourself.

Belief in God is a Moral Matter

The world has gone mad over the last four or five decades but, because it has happened bit by bit, relatively few have noticed. You might say there was always been an element of madness about humanity but at least the West, under the influence of Christianity,  attempted to move in the right direction most of the time. Now, however, many people believe things unquestioningly that not a few generations ago only a small minority of people were promoting, and they weren't visionaries but, for the most part, troublemakers and egotists, heirs to Rousseau and Marx and other rebels against truth.  But we have gradually abandoned common sense and our natural instincts, and allowed ourselves to be dragooned into a world of lies and deceit. This is what happens when God is chased from the world.

Please continue reading on Albion Awakening.

God and Nothing

This is an extract from a book due to come out later this year but it includes bits left out of the book mainly because they over-complicated the principal point of the relevant chapter. Which I hope they don't do here.

God nowadays is often described as transcending any idea of sexual distinction. Either above masculine and feminine or else including both within himself. And if we are positing an abstract Supreme Principle, unmanifest spirit in its pure 'isness', that would no doubt be correct. But if we are talking about the Creator, the one who created the universe, who created our souls and made us individual beings, the one who Jesus Christ called Father and with whom we can have a relationship, then we might have to reconsider that idea. Naturally the fact he is Father does not mean he doesn't contain all qualities within himself but still as the Creator he is Father, and Creation results from the projection of an unexpressed feminine side of the divine being. So God is not biologically male but, as a Person, he is masculine and all souls are feminine to him which is demonstrated by the fact that souls can only become spiritually alive through receiving spiritual impregnation from him, otherwise known as grace.

Is reality ultimately personal or impersonal? If the latter, as with the god of the philosophers, it is difficult to see how the former could ever have arisen or how love, beauty and goodness could have the meaning they do. Ultimately they would be swallowed up, being just pointers to absolute oneness. And if they don’t have any ultimate meaning then they don’t have true meaning at all. However if reality is personal, as the Christian revelation maintains, then life is actually alive and love is real and goodness is truth. I would say that the personal is not a lower, more relative, manifestation of the impersonal absolute but the very heart and point of existence. So the personal is not a limited or bound aspect of the impersonal but the impersonal is a non-manifested aspect of the personal, and it is the personal that is true ultimate reality. The foundation of the universe is not pure being but I AM.

And here perhaps we have the clue to the whole mystery.  God in the absolute sense prior to creation is I AM, therefore transcending duality. But when he manifests himself in creation as the Creator that becomes the masculine polarity and creation is feminine to him. Thus from pure Subject comes Subject and Object, and I believe this gives us an insight into the heart of the origin of the masculine/feminine polarity and a pointer as to what it really means.

For here as Subject and Object we have the two cosmic principles in their most undifferentiated forms. Now, in the context of creation all human beings contain both principles within them so this is not a description of men and women. Reality is much subtler than that. Nevertheless it does point to an archetypal truth about the two sexes and is a guide as to the fundamental dynamics of the relationship between them.

And so from the standpoint of Creator and creation we see that God is masculine before he is feminine even though divine reality includes and contains both. Numerically this can be represented as 2 (female) coming from 1 (male) and then from these arise ‘the ten thousand things’ as creation is called in Taoism. But I should briefly mention a metaphysical speculation that the Mother is not just universal Nature, the ground of matter, space and time in which all things are born, the mirror which enables God to see himself. She is also the emptiness beyond being from whence God himself arises, the 0 before 1. Where this theory falls down is that God does not arise from anywhere. He eternally is. For there is no 0 before 1 except from the point of view of creation, of form, time and space. But the Absolute is not 0. What is more there is no beyond being. There is a state beyond becoming but that is a different matter (no pun intended). Something (God) does not come from nothing (emptiness or zero) even though we may have to resort to an apophatic type language to describe God’s essence, the what of his being. But the one eternally is, existing at the deepest level of being. This theory also conflicts with the idea of the fundamental Personhood of God, his who, which is base level reality. For the Mother is the Mother of the Son not the Father, and the darkness of her womb is that of the prima materia before it is touched by the spirit of God and bursts into the light of Creation. 

0 can only refer to the 'time' before the creation of matter; in Christian terms the 'nothing' from which God created (which was actually out of himself I would say). It does not refer to God himself who is now and always the One. In spiritual terms there is no such thing as zero.