Two More Interviews

Here are links to a couple more interviews. It's actually one interview with Ana Isabel of the In the light - Growing your Soul podcast but in two parts with the first about about Earth is a School and the second a look at my astrological chart which makes it different from the other talks. And on an astrological note, looking at the interviews I've have done recently has given me an interesting insight into the meaning of the rising sign or ascendant. This is supposed to signify how you present yourself to the world, your social personality. It represents how others see you and the general impression you give to the world. Mine is in Cancer and this has always puzzled me as I don't feel anything particularly Cancerian about myself. My Virgo sun, Scorpio moon and Libran Mercury and Venus all make sense but not so much the Cancer ascendant. However, the me in these interviews does indeed seem quite Cancerian. A salutary lesson that our image of ourself is not how we appear to others.

Earth is a School interview with Ana Isabel

Astrology analysis with Ana Isabel

My thanks to Ana for two very enjoyable talks.

I am a Christian

 In some of the interviews I have done recently to talk about Earth is a School I said that I was a Christian but not an orthodox one. This could seem as though I am trying to hedge my bets so I would like to be clearer on that score. Here's what I believe.

I believe in God the Father, Maker of Heaven and Earth. I believe that there was something approximating to the Fall when early humanity went against divine decree and that sin and death entered the world in the form we now know them. Clearly, sin must have potentially existed before as part of free will because what Adam and Eve did was sin but presumably this was the first actual sin. Similarly, death would have existed because I can't see Adam and Eve as existing in the Garden of Eden unchangingly forever but it would have been painless change without the suffering it acquired after the Fall.

I believe that God sent Jesus to the world to redeem it from sin. This means that previously souls may have died and been reborn endlessly as many pagan religions believed with the only escape that discovered by the Buddha. There would have been time spent on the inner planes of being but there was no Heaven in the sense of union with God that is known in the beatific vision. Jesus, through his birth, death and resurrection, sanctified matter, removing the corruption of the Fall. He took on a material body and being free from any possibility of sin actually changed the structure of matter, literally so for him, potentially so for anyone who followed him and allowed his life into theirs. This also meant that the individual soul, which is the point at which spirit and matter meet, could be sanctified and made whole, cured rather than killed.

I believe that Christ was the Son of God by which I mean he was not just an advanced spirit or higher being who had preceded us on the path. The attempt to cast him in this light may even be part of the ongoing demonic attempt to belittle Christianity. I don't know exactly what Son of God means but I accept it on faith because it has the quality of the profoundest of truths. Attempts to reduce Christ to a special kind of prophet or enlightened soul are just wrong. He was and is something much more. I believe in all his miracles exactly as recounted in the Gospels and I absolutely believe in the Resurrection. With the Resurrection everything makes sense. It is the ground from which truth, goodness and beauty spring in the world. Without it there is only darkness and death.

I believe that Jesus was born through the Virgin Mary who was chosen for this mission because of her innate purity and goodness. I think that attempts to create a feminine spirituality in Gaia worship or something like that are atavistic and wrong. No one will get past the psychic and material worlds by following that path. The embodiment and pattern of feminine spirituality is the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God. A proper feminism, a truly spiritual feminism, would recognise that.

I believe in the saints and the Company of Heaven. I don't think that when such souls were in this world they were all Christian because I am sure that Christ works through other religions and "the wind bloweth where it listeth." But they now all serve under Christ. These saints seek to bring us up to their level but that requires us to open our hearts to truth, and truth exists on its own terms. We can never bend it to suit us.

I believe that Christ taught us that the major lesson on this Earth is self-sacrifice through love. All the attempts to attain higher consciousness that do not have this at their heart are doomed to failure because it is the key to Heaven. Christ taught this and demonstrated it in his life. He laid down the path and all we have to do is follow him.

There are many other things I believe about the spiritual world but these are the foundation stones of my approach to it.

Oneness Spirituality

 It is a common error of the mystically inclined, especially, the more introverted types who find the spiritual path an excuse to retreat from the complications and demands of the world, to dismiss matter, regarding it as illusion or unimportant, and focus their entire attention on absorption into spirit. But they need to ask themselves this simple question, why they are actually in this world in the first place? Why are they not just remaining in spirit and avoiding the difficulties and challenges of this world of duality? Wouldn't a loving God have let them stay in spiritual peace and bliss instead of, as it were, turfing them out of bed? Time to get up! Time to be born!

God loves us and because he loves us he wants us to grow. That's what this world is for. A training ground for the spirit in which innate potentials can be brought out and developed through the challenges we face here and questions that are asked of us. The main question, the one on which depends our eventual destination after material life, is what relation do we want with God and creation? Do we wish to conform our being to them or do we instead choose to go our own way? We can reject both as most of the world appears to be doing now or we can reject the living, loving creative God and retreat to God in his mode of pure being, a non-creative aspect of the divine. But that is a limited God and it is not what he wants for us because he wants us to be like him in his fullness, in being and in creativity, in his nighttime and daytime modes.

Many mystics misconceive the spiritual path. The purpose of this path is not to become less and less and eventually disappear but to embrace more and more of God. Only thus can you actually serve him and justify your creation. If you want to disappear into God, what use are you to him? What are you adding to creation? Why were you born and why do you live? Many mystics just want to retreat to the safety of the Mother but we are enjoined to progress to the Father which means become spiritually active and responsible, workers in creation not just chewers of the spiritual cud. For the spiritual goal is not to regress to the womb of the Great Mother but to be born anew and walk in the bright light of the Heavenly Father.

Another Interview

 Here's a link to another interview I recently did to talk about Earth is a School. This one was with Del Lessy of the UPRN radio show ‘The Delicious Recipe’. Del was a very engaging host and we had a good chat though it was after midnight for me, past my bedtime, which is why I am a bit bleary-eyed!

Interview

Be Free

 It's time to subject the old liberal belief that there can be good people on both sides of an argument to a serious reassessment. Perhaps it was true at one time when truth and lies were not as widely separated as they have become. It's not true now. Increasingly there is truth and there are lies and if you follow the latter it is because something has gone wrong within you. Your roots have become twisted. You don't follow lies if you are a righteous person. I don't say a good person because "there is none good but one, that is, God" (Mark 10:18), but a righteous person leans towards truth and goodness and wishes to accommodate his soul to those things. A righteous person chooses righteously.

Reasonable people want to argue and discuss reasonably, respecting the position of their opponent. I don't respect the opinion of anyone who denies the truth of God. I don't respect anyone who is on board with the corruption of morals as in the sexual revolution and elsewhere. I don't respect anyone who is happy with the degradation of art since the First World War (before then art, generally speaking, elevated, after then, generally speaking, it debased). I don't respect anyone who idolises materialistic science and seeks to deform the human being through technology. I don't respect religious people who compartmentalise their religion and don't let it rule every aspect of their lives. I could go on but the point is made. I don't respect those who, willingly or through intellectual laziness or spiritual shallowness, allow evil to manifest in the world. Yes, evil is subtle and deceptive but it's not that clever. It can only deceive those who allow themselves to be deceived because they have fallen away from goodness and truth.

This is a time of separation of good and evil. Either you are happy with a world in which a small elite controls everything and everyone or else you fight back against the fear and refuse to follow the diktats that would control you. Make the effort to see that the pecks don't really work and that they are here to stay if we let that happen. In themselves they are likely to be but a precursor to something much more serious, perhaps implants of some sort so that you can be numbered and counted and everything about you known and controlled at all times. Understand that covering your face with a cloth is of no earthly use against something as small as that which it is supposed to exclude. The practise is intended to dehumanise and control. You are not being an egotistical fanatic to recognise this. You are standing up for the truth of your being as a free son or daughter of God. It is not just your right. It is your duty.

We are being herded into pens and once there we will find it hard to get out. Much better not to get in in the first place. Are you going to meekly obey either because of fear or because you have allowed yourself to be tricked into thinking that it is the socially acceptable thing to do? It may be socially acceptable in a world of lies but it is spiritually irresponsible. Or are you going to do your duty to God and your fellow man and stand up for freedom?

How Do We Know These Are The End Times?

 In Christian tradition the End Times is that period when humanity is judged. Other traditions, most notably the Indian, also speak of a period when true spiritual understanding is lost and mankind has descended into materialism and ignorance. It is that time when we have gone so far away from the source that we have not only lost contact with it but even deny that it exists. We redefine  good and evil to mean what brings happiness or removes suffering in the physical world with no thought of the spiritual. There is no longer an absolute reality that can serve as the bedrock of moral being. As a result, the centre constantly shifts until there is no real centre at all and we behave with increasing egotism. 

There are several indicators that we are in the End Times now. The first and most obvious is that we live in a world in which materialism and atheism are the default assumptions. More and more, as has been proved over the last year or so, even religion submits itself to the materialistic diktats. Religious belief is allowed only when it doesn't interfere with what is actually supposed to matter. Most children grow up today with no awareness of any spiritual tradition. If they do know of anything like that it's often just quaint and irrelevant to so-called real life. Christianity, as was predicted, has been chased to the periphery, a hangover from the past which may be admired for its humanistic qualities but has no spiritual significance.

That would actually suffice by itself to prove that we are indeed in the End Times but there are many other clear signs this is so. One not mentioned in prophecy, as far as I know, but highly significant is that the population of the world has expanded to unprecedented levels. It makes perfect sense that at a time of mass testing and gathering in, a separation of sheep and goats, very many souls would be present. This is a point of culmination and many souls would either wish to be present or are required as an examination of their spiritual polarity to be present. Souls of all degrees are being asked fundamental questions and their response will have a bearing on their future existence. It is as though we have taken the course and are now being tested on what we have learnt. Most people don't know they are being tested but that is part of the test.

As the End Times is a summing up of an entire cycle we find that all the past has now become present in a certain form. We have access to the previous ages in a way that has never before existed. Anyone in any part of the world can acquaint himself with the knowledge and culture of all historic civilisations. Everything is being swept up and brought into this grand culminating moment. It may even be that the enormous population increase of the last few decades is because all souls who incarnated during the age that is coming to a close have been summoned to appear before the court. It's a time of reckoning and everything that existed in whatever form has been swept up and brought into the here and now.

The End Times were predicted and they were predictable because they are an inevitable result of entropy. At the beginning of a cycle a great infusion of spiritual energy is injected into the world. It is this infusion that makes the Golden Age that all traditions speak of as having existed at the beginning of time. After that there is a continual dropping off of truth and righteousness until these things have almost entirely disappeared. That time is now. Of course, as the spiritual energy dissipates there is a compensatory response on the material level and that is why we have have reached such heights of technology and material well-being, factors which enable the great increase in population. But this material progress masks and also contributes to the spiritual decline and this latter has now reached such proportions as to lead one to the conclusion that a significant point is at hand.

The dominance of technology in today's world is another factor that points to the End Times. We are dependent on it in every aspect of our lives, but here's the truth. Technology separates us both from the spiritual and from the natural. We are so foolish as to celebrate that and even to seriously consider augmenting our being with technology, in effect turning ourselves into machines. For advocates of this diabolical practice it is just a development from a person wearing a pair of glasses but there is a line which we appear shortly about to cross, one in which the technological/mechanical will dominate, and if we do cross that we will actually lose our humanity. I suspect that for many this may already have started to happen and when it happens on a large scale the world will be completely cut off from the spiritual at which point it will collapse. It is the spiritual that gives life. When that has gone existence can only be maintained by stealing life from elsewhere. In a world that has given itself over to technology in the extreme sense I am talking about the stronger will maintain themselves by feeding off the weaker. That is the world of hell. In the Golden Age there was no technology because there was no need for it. I am not saying that all technology is evil but it always has a tendency to become so and it has certainly become so now.

The End Times have arrived. What a privilege to be alive now! By resisting the downward pull we can make a great leap forward in our spiritual evolution. Now, to be spiritually focussed you must make an active effort to be so. Society will not make you go in that direction. You must swim against the tide and the current is strong. But this will develop your spiritual muscles. You have the opportunity of a lifetime.

An Interview with Theresa Cheung

 Here's a link to an interview I recently did with Theresa Cheung on her White Shores podcast. We were talking about my new book Earth is a School. Theresa was a very sympathetic host and I would like to thank her for having me on her show.

Interview with Theresa Cheung

Listening back, I notice that I didn't properly answer her question about why bad things happen to good people, especially children. That's the hardest question for we all know that they do. To talk about karma from previous lives might be true but can also seem somewhat dismissive, almost as though these bad things don't really matter or were somehow deserved. I believe many bad experiences are the result of karma and do contain lessons but I don't see how one can honestly apply this rule to all of them and in particular to those of children. The only answer I can give is that in a fallen world, which this is, there is evil and the only way for God to remove that would be to override free will which, once given, he cannot do or it would be conditional which it cannot be if it is truly to be free. However, I also believe that all tears, especially those that arise from the activity of evil, will be wiped away and we will be compensated for all suffering. Perhaps also those that suffer unjustly carry and transmute some of the pain of the world just as Jesus did and that sacrifice is their heroic gift to life.