It seems that the age of miracles has not yet passed.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/23/sex-married-heterosexual-couples-church-of-england-christians
The extraordinary thing about this is not in what is said but that it is the Church of England that is actually coming out and saying it, and without qualifying it to take the edge off it. The article says that this pronouncement will "delight conservatives" as though somehow the C of E has capitulated to the forces of ignorance and bigotry. But then it is the Guardian. Has Anglicanism discovered a spiritual backbone? Unlikely but, at least, it has for once made something of a stand against the ceaseless encroachment of secularism into its thinking.
Thursday, 23 January 2020
Monday, 20 January 2020
Christian Unity
According to modern beliefs, the essence of Christianity is bringing people together and uniting them where there is division. We are all one and anything that seeks to divide or separate is evil. We must find and celebrate common ground where we all can meet wherever that exists, and ignore everything that goes against that. It's all superficial compared to our oneness as human beings and what we share as children of God. Especially at Christmas we hear plenty of commentaries based on this theme. We should all love one another and be one big, happy family in which everyone is valued and no one is made to feel worse than anyone else. God loves us unconditionally no matter what we are, and we must treat our fellow men and women in that same spirit if we are good people.
This, dear readers, is a damnable lie put about to avoid facing the reality of what Christ is and what he demands from us, and to make the point I have selected some key quotes from Jesus which completely contradict the unity above all else theme.
This, dear readers, is a damnable lie put about to avoid facing the reality of what Christ is and what he demands from us, and to make the point I have selected some key quotes from Jesus which completely contradict the unity above all else theme.
"Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law"
Matthew 10.34-35
"Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. Many will say to Me in that day, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?’ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!’" Matthew 7 21-23
"Many are called but few are chosen." Matthew 22:14
“If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you". John 15 18-20
"He that is not with me is against me: and he that gathers not with me scatters". Luke 11:23
There are several more which those more learned in scripture than me will be able to call to mind. Please feel free to add them in the comment section. The point I wish to make is not that division is good and unity bad, but that unity is not the pre-eminent virtue it is claimed to be. That would be truth. Those who honour and follow God's truth cannot make common cause with those who go against it. They are not equally justified and it is entirely wrong to give them equal consideration. Unity in this case simply destroys truth which, of course, is why it is promoted in these times of near universal apostasy.
God certainly does love all human souls and it is precisely because he loves us that he calls us to give up what separates us from him. Which would be our attachment to some sort of sin. If we will not do that then we cut ourselves off from his love and put ourselves out of spiritual oneness. If you want to join a club you must obey the rules.
There are several more which those more learned in scripture than me will be able to call to mind. Please feel free to add them in the comment section. The point I wish to make is not that division is good and unity bad, but that unity is not the pre-eminent virtue it is claimed to be. That would be truth. Those who honour and follow God's truth cannot make common cause with those who go against it. They are not equally justified and it is entirely wrong to give them equal consideration. Unity in this case simply destroys truth which, of course, is why it is promoted in these times of near universal apostasy.
God certainly does love all human souls and it is precisely because he loves us that he calls us to give up what separates us from him. Which would be our attachment to some sort of sin. If we will not do that then we cut ourselves off from his love and put ourselves out of spiritual oneness. If you want to join a club you must obey the rules.
Friday, 17 January 2020
A New Spirituality
A new approach to spirituality is required today. One that has two equally important strands to it, strands that reflect the world as it is and the world as it is becoming by which I mean the eternal verities of God and the evolutionary changes of Man. Both are needed if we are to move forward as individuals and as humanity.
It is no longer enough to follow authority, either old or new, conservative or progressive. We must find the truth within ourselves so that we start to become it and do not remain outside it. We are not expected to be passive subjects of the divine any more but should actively cooperate with it. It is not enough to obey, we must know and for this imagination and intuition need to be developed. These are the creative power and the inner knowledge of the soul. A spiritual person who lacks these has no contact with the soul and is therefore a spiritual person in name only, an appreciator of art perhaps but not an artist. It is spiritual artists we are called upon to become now. This is in line with the unfoldment of human consciousness which gradually transforms an individual from the state of passive ignorance to that of a god, a developed son or daughter of God, able to work with or even beside the Father.
However, the development of imagination, the creative principle, on its own is not sufficient. That may take us beyond the limitations of the material world but it will not take us to the spiritual, or not the true spiritual anyway. A simulacrum of spirituality might well be encountered and mistaken for the real thing, and this is a common modern error found particularly among this who confuse the magical with the mystical. But imagination is like spiritual fuel and it needs something to light it to make it burst into flame.
That something is, of course, Christ. Without him any spirituality we might have will remain, at best, natural which is to say we may attain something like enlightenment but we will not attain salvation. I define the difference between these two in the following way.
The Buddhist goal of Nirvana exists even if it is only rarely attained. Much more rarely than might be thought by the literature and teachers devoted to it. On the other hand, states of consciousness that are similar to it are frequently encountered by spiritual aspirants. These can be called samadhi, satori and so on but all amount to more or less the same thing, a condition of mind in which the self is seemingly transcended and consciousness made one with the whole universe. Now, this is a true psychological state. It is not an illusion but a real part of God's creation. Nonetheless, it is within the creation not beyond it. It remains part of man's psychological make-up and is not a spiritual state in the true supernatural sense notwithstanding the fact that it might feel like that in comparison to normal consciousness restricted to the physical plane. But it is not salvation which is the only thing that can take us beyond the merely human and the creation and which is only found through Christ.
Spirituality without Christ cannot take you to heaven which is the only place truly outside the earthly creation. But, at the same time, we should now be moving into a new understanding that requires us not just to follow Christ as external saviour but to allow him to transform us from within. We need to contact Christ inwardly and this we do through faith, imagination, intuition and love. But note that all these qualities, especially the last, have been subjected to misinterpretation, distortion and reduced to humanistic terms. They must be God-centred or they are not spiritually focused.
Two things then are required for this new spirituality and they can be called intuition and tradition. One relates to individual spiritual awareness, the other to revelation. One is God in his immanent form and the other is him as his transcendent being. We must respond to both. The former needs to be checked and balanced by the latter if it is not to veer off into (possible) illusion and narcissism. The latter needs to be supplemented by an inner realisation that turns bare bones into a living thing and makes the universal personal.
God is the same today, yesterday and forever but he is always making all things new. Truth never changes but our capacity to know it and live it grows and deepens. The new does not deny the old and if it is not built on the old it is a false new. But it does transform the old. We have reached a point at which we can take a great spiritual leap forward but if we move in the wrong direction we will be lost. As always, it's up to us.
It is no longer enough to follow authority, either old or new, conservative or progressive. We must find the truth within ourselves so that we start to become it and do not remain outside it. We are not expected to be passive subjects of the divine any more but should actively cooperate with it. It is not enough to obey, we must know and for this imagination and intuition need to be developed. These are the creative power and the inner knowledge of the soul. A spiritual person who lacks these has no contact with the soul and is therefore a spiritual person in name only, an appreciator of art perhaps but not an artist. It is spiritual artists we are called upon to become now. This is in line with the unfoldment of human consciousness which gradually transforms an individual from the state of passive ignorance to that of a god, a developed son or daughter of God, able to work with or even beside the Father.
However, the development of imagination, the creative principle, on its own is not sufficient. That may take us beyond the limitations of the material world but it will not take us to the spiritual, or not the true spiritual anyway. A simulacrum of spirituality might well be encountered and mistaken for the real thing, and this is a common modern error found particularly among this who confuse the magical with the mystical. But imagination is like spiritual fuel and it needs something to light it to make it burst into flame.
That something is, of course, Christ. Without him any spirituality we might have will remain, at best, natural which is to say we may attain something like enlightenment but we will not attain salvation. I define the difference between these two in the following way.
The Buddhist goal of Nirvana exists even if it is only rarely attained. Much more rarely than might be thought by the literature and teachers devoted to it. On the other hand, states of consciousness that are similar to it are frequently encountered by spiritual aspirants. These can be called samadhi, satori and so on but all amount to more or less the same thing, a condition of mind in which the self is seemingly transcended and consciousness made one with the whole universe. Now, this is a true psychological state. It is not an illusion but a real part of God's creation. Nonetheless, it is within the creation not beyond it. It remains part of man's psychological make-up and is not a spiritual state in the true supernatural sense notwithstanding the fact that it might feel like that in comparison to normal consciousness restricted to the physical plane. But it is not salvation which is the only thing that can take us beyond the merely human and the creation and which is only found through Christ.
Spirituality without Christ cannot take you to heaven which is the only place truly outside the earthly creation. But, at the same time, we should now be moving into a new understanding that requires us not just to follow Christ as external saviour but to allow him to transform us from within. We need to contact Christ inwardly and this we do through faith, imagination, intuition and love. But note that all these qualities, especially the last, have been subjected to misinterpretation, distortion and reduced to humanistic terms. They must be God-centred or they are not spiritually focused.
Two things then are required for this new spirituality and they can be called intuition and tradition. One relates to individual spiritual awareness, the other to revelation. One is God in his immanent form and the other is him as his transcendent being. We must respond to both. The former needs to be checked and balanced by the latter if it is not to veer off into (possible) illusion and narcissism. The latter needs to be supplemented by an inner realisation that turns bare bones into a living thing and makes the universal personal.
God is the same today, yesterday and forever but he is always making all things new. Truth never changes but our capacity to know it and live it grows and deepens. The new does not deny the old and if it is not built on the old it is a false new. But it does transform the old. We have reached a point at which we can take a great spiritual leap forward but if we move in the wrong direction we will be lost. As always, it's up to us.
Monday, 13 January 2020
The Modern Experiment
There is a school of thought that regards the whole development of modernity beginning in the West in the Renaissance as a terrible error, entirely destructive of true religion and spiritual understanding. I sympathise with that point of view but don't agree. The truth is there was a great purpose behind what we loosely call the modern world but it was a risk that could either advance the human race and take it to new heights or else take it back to a primitive level from where it would have to effectively start again. Or even destroy it completely.
The experiment was in consciousness. Human consciousness became more focused on itself, more individual, so that it could be more creative and, once realigned to a spiritual sensibility, more godlike. From being largely passive children of God we could become gods ourselves, able to wield divine powers for the creative enlargement of the universe. This was always intended as the evolutionary path that humanity should follow but I believe that in the West a few hundred years ago the process was stimulated and accelerated. A gradual evolution was boosted. This was done by the incarnation of certain highly evolved souls who could act like leaven in flour, obvious examples Leonardo da Vinci, Shakespeare and Beethoven* but there were many others at various levels and in various fields, and also, I would conjecture, by angelic forces acting on human consciousness from within. This double process has brought about the world today.
However, sound as the principles involved were, everything depended on the reception of human beings to their new powers, as powers is what they were. Would they use them to become more aware of God or would it be to pursue their own individual ends in their immediate environment? We know the answer to that. Does this mean the experiment has failed? Not necessarily. It may be that it was never intended to be universal. Many individual souls have responded in a positive fashion. Many more (as is shown by the state of the world today) have not but if we think of comparisons in nature, this may be regarded as acceptable. For instance, how many seeds sprout and then grow to maturity? A fraction of those that are produced by the parent plants. This doesn't mean that souls that have not reacted properly, i.e. spiritually, are rejected and die but they may be replanted in other environments more suitable to their state of evolution. That is what I think is happening now. I have often written that it is a time of decision. It is a winnowing of souls, a real sheep and goats moment in the history of human evolution on this planet.
Earth is like a field in which many seeds are sown. Generally the growing process takes place in the normal course of events. Long periods go by when nothing much happens. Cycles roll round and there is little change. But sometimes growing conditions are enhanced, extra fertiliser is added, say, or there is an ideal combination of sun and rain. That is what has happened in the world, starting in the West and then, through the much maligned process of colonisation by the European powers, spreading elsewhere. Some plants have grown to be strong and upright but others have either not grown as they should or developed in the wrong way and turned into weeds rather than beautiful flowers. Perhaps it depends on the original seeds, perhaps on how they have reacted for the peculiarity of these particular seeds is that their development is due to inner as well as outer factors.
So now we are living at a time when the results of the experiment are being revealed. The stimulated individual consciousness of man is making its choice. A choice of God or self. The experiment is coming to an end. It was obviously not a full success. Indeed, it must be seen, as far as one can tell at the moment with limited vision, as a failure but then God knows what his intentions were and these may extend a lot further that we can see. (I say God. It is probably high spiritual beings more akin to the elohim of the Bible who are behind this experiment). But, as things appear to be here and now, the experiment has had only a limited success. The bulk of humanity has not responded to the stimulus in the right way. Perhaps, though, there will be either collectively or in the lives of each individual one final event that will call forth a definitive choice, a chance to put right errors of the past and seize the upward current. The groundwork is being laid with the diverging paths becoming more and more clearly marked out.
Divine sparks of consciousness come to Earth to unfold their innate qualities of Will, Love, Knowledge and Creativity. Incarnated in human bodies which have evolved as fit receptacles for them, they seek expression through the various groupings of mankind and epochs of history. They develop slowly. But each one of these sparks is individual and responds in an individual manner even if this is not really perceived as such until a certain stage in the process is reached. At that stage the process may be accelerated, pressures applied that will bring out innate qualities, good or bad. This is what has occurred over the last 5 centuries, though there are always greater cycles and lesser cycles so one cannot be completely dogmatic about this. But still one can say that the last half millennium is highly unusual, One can also say that the momentum that started then is reaching its climax now. At one time there may have been the possibility of a great spiritual leap forward. That presumably was the hope. It seems that this hope will not be realised collectively but it certainly still possible on an individual level.
The choice remains ours. To retune our individual self to the greater Overself of God or to keep it as a separate thing, pursuing its own limited ends in a limited material world. To join together in a holy marriage the two poles of spirit and matter within our being or to keep them separate, as in their different ways, the Buddhist and the materialist do. Clearly, the Buddhist is wiser than the materialist as spirit is the supreme principle but even he ignores the true divine destiny that is open to the modern consciousness in which goodness, beauty, truth and love can all be brought out into full expression.
* Musically, I prefer composers such as Bach or even Thomas Tallis but these wrote in existing styles whereas Beethoven did something new and had a much greater impact on consciousness.
The experiment was in consciousness. Human consciousness became more focused on itself, more individual, so that it could be more creative and, once realigned to a spiritual sensibility, more godlike. From being largely passive children of God we could become gods ourselves, able to wield divine powers for the creative enlargement of the universe. This was always intended as the evolutionary path that humanity should follow but I believe that in the West a few hundred years ago the process was stimulated and accelerated. A gradual evolution was boosted. This was done by the incarnation of certain highly evolved souls who could act like leaven in flour, obvious examples Leonardo da Vinci, Shakespeare and Beethoven* but there were many others at various levels and in various fields, and also, I would conjecture, by angelic forces acting on human consciousness from within. This double process has brought about the world today.
However, sound as the principles involved were, everything depended on the reception of human beings to their new powers, as powers is what they were. Would they use them to become more aware of God or would it be to pursue their own individual ends in their immediate environment? We know the answer to that. Does this mean the experiment has failed? Not necessarily. It may be that it was never intended to be universal. Many individual souls have responded in a positive fashion. Many more (as is shown by the state of the world today) have not but if we think of comparisons in nature, this may be regarded as acceptable. For instance, how many seeds sprout and then grow to maturity? A fraction of those that are produced by the parent plants. This doesn't mean that souls that have not reacted properly, i.e. spiritually, are rejected and die but they may be replanted in other environments more suitable to their state of evolution. That is what I think is happening now. I have often written that it is a time of decision. It is a winnowing of souls, a real sheep and goats moment in the history of human evolution on this planet.
Earth is like a field in which many seeds are sown. Generally the growing process takes place in the normal course of events. Long periods go by when nothing much happens. Cycles roll round and there is little change. But sometimes growing conditions are enhanced, extra fertiliser is added, say, or there is an ideal combination of sun and rain. That is what has happened in the world, starting in the West and then, through the much maligned process of colonisation by the European powers, spreading elsewhere. Some plants have grown to be strong and upright but others have either not grown as they should or developed in the wrong way and turned into weeds rather than beautiful flowers. Perhaps it depends on the original seeds, perhaps on how they have reacted for the peculiarity of these particular seeds is that their development is due to inner as well as outer factors.
So now we are living at a time when the results of the experiment are being revealed. The stimulated individual consciousness of man is making its choice. A choice of God or self. The experiment is coming to an end. It was obviously not a full success. Indeed, it must be seen, as far as one can tell at the moment with limited vision, as a failure but then God knows what his intentions were and these may extend a lot further that we can see. (I say God. It is probably high spiritual beings more akin to the elohim of the Bible who are behind this experiment). But, as things appear to be here and now, the experiment has had only a limited success. The bulk of humanity has not responded to the stimulus in the right way. Perhaps, though, there will be either collectively or in the lives of each individual one final event that will call forth a definitive choice, a chance to put right errors of the past and seize the upward current. The groundwork is being laid with the diverging paths becoming more and more clearly marked out.
Divine sparks of consciousness come to Earth to unfold their innate qualities of Will, Love, Knowledge and Creativity. Incarnated in human bodies which have evolved as fit receptacles for them, they seek expression through the various groupings of mankind and epochs of history. They develop slowly. But each one of these sparks is individual and responds in an individual manner even if this is not really perceived as such until a certain stage in the process is reached. At that stage the process may be accelerated, pressures applied that will bring out innate qualities, good or bad. This is what has occurred over the last 5 centuries, though there are always greater cycles and lesser cycles so one cannot be completely dogmatic about this. But still one can say that the last half millennium is highly unusual, One can also say that the momentum that started then is reaching its climax now. At one time there may have been the possibility of a great spiritual leap forward. That presumably was the hope. It seems that this hope will not be realised collectively but it certainly still possible on an individual level.
The choice remains ours. To retune our individual self to the greater Overself of God or to keep it as a separate thing, pursuing its own limited ends in a limited material world. To join together in a holy marriage the two poles of spirit and matter within our being or to keep them separate, as in their different ways, the Buddhist and the materialist do. Clearly, the Buddhist is wiser than the materialist as spirit is the supreme principle but even he ignores the true divine destiny that is open to the modern consciousness in which goodness, beauty, truth and love can all be brought out into full expression.
* Musically, I prefer composers such as Bach or even Thomas Tallis but these wrote in existing styles whereas Beethoven did something new and had a much greater impact on consciousness.
Thursday, 9 January 2020
Will, Imagination and Evil
I was castigated recently for going on too much about evil on this blog. I take the point but I would counter that we are living in a particularly evil time. In some respects, the worst ever since evil is essentially the denial of God in whom all good is centred and from whom all good arises. Today we have moved beyond the spiritual negligence of the 20th century into the active rejection of not only God but his created order as well.
People usually point to Hitler as the embodiment of evil in the modern age but I would maintain that, spiritually speaking, there are people as evil as him living now who outwardly might appear exemplary citizens. If you find this statement shocking let me point out that evil is not just measured by the bad things you may do. It is measured by your approach to reality. Reality is God. So when I use the word evil, I don't simply mean bad in the conventional anti-human sense. I refer to an attitude to life, an attitude towards the Creator. The anti-God sense. An evil attitude sets itself against real goodness and truth which are necessarily spiritual. They must be. If there is no spiritual truth then nothing has intrinsic reality and good and evil are meaningless terms.
The 20th century had Communism and Nazism which were obvious evils and had to be fought. But in the 21st century the dark powers have changed their tactics and evil takes a softer, subtler form, disguising itself as good but just as spiritually pernicious, probably more so as the soul embraces this spiritual evil willingly in the belief that it is being virtuous. This would not happen if the soul were rightly oriented and less fixated on itself and its lower nature to the detriment of God and its higher reality. But it does happen because the soul gives itself to a false good, a good based on its own fallen desires.
The false good is the religion of humanity in which natural and spiritual differences are denied, the higher brought down to the level of the lower and the fact of spiritual evil as a real thing dismissed as a prejudice of the ignorant, to believe in which is actually hateful. This false good also creates for itself a false evil which is anything in which the religion of humanity, together with its central pillar of egalitarianism or oneness, is denied. What the religion of humanity ignores is that being human in the full sense requires seeking the truth of one's being in what is beyond the merely human. If this aspiration or vision of humanity is not allowed then what happens is this. Instead of rising above the human, one falls below it. Humanity, in this sense, is a staging post not a destination which is not to lessen it but to see it in its proper context of spiritual transformation. It seems to be inevitable that if a human being does not seek to transcend himself he will fall into a lower than human state. Not animal which is a worthy, natural state but sub-human. Many of the demons belong to this category.
From a spiritual perspective, the most important human faculties are the will and the imagination. In modern man, both of these have been corrupted. The will is no longer oriented to God as it is in a spiritually healthy human being. It points towards self. And the imagination has been crippled by materialism with the result that the images that feed it are not based on symbols of the divine but, increasingly, those that derive from the infernal regions. Look at so much of modern art, music, film and general culture. Isn't it obvious where this comes from? Imagination now is not called to higher levels of being but spiritual debasement.
The modern age has been marked by the desire to liberate the human will from its 'enslavement' to God, rejected (irrationally) as irrational. What lies behind this supposed search for freedom is actually egotism with truth bent to suit the agenda of the autonomous ego. What results is not freedom but increased enslavement to the restrictions of matter. There is no freedom in matter. Without spirit there is only darkness and death. The human imagination has fallen into darkness and can only rise out of that when it opens itself up to transcendent reality. Re-polarise your will to the truth of God and allow your imagination to receive spiritual light.
People usually point to Hitler as the embodiment of evil in the modern age but I would maintain that, spiritually speaking, there are people as evil as him living now who outwardly might appear exemplary citizens. If you find this statement shocking let me point out that evil is not just measured by the bad things you may do. It is measured by your approach to reality. Reality is God. So when I use the word evil, I don't simply mean bad in the conventional anti-human sense. I refer to an attitude to life, an attitude towards the Creator. The anti-God sense. An evil attitude sets itself against real goodness and truth which are necessarily spiritual. They must be. If there is no spiritual truth then nothing has intrinsic reality and good and evil are meaningless terms.
The 20th century had Communism and Nazism which were obvious evils and had to be fought. But in the 21st century the dark powers have changed their tactics and evil takes a softer, subtler form, disguising itself as good but just as spiritually pernicious, probably more so as the soul embraces this spiritual evil willingly in the belief that it is being virtuous. This would not happen if the soul were rightly oriented and less fixated on itself and its lower nature to the detriment of God and its higher reality. But it does happen because the soul gives itself to a false good, a good based on its own fallen desires.
The false good is the religion of humanity in which natural and spiritual differences are denied, the higher brought down to the level of the lower and the fact of spiritual evil as a real thing dismissed as a prejudice of the ignorant, to believe in which is actually hateful. This false good also creates for itself a false evil which is anything in which the religion of humanity, together with its central pillar of egalitarianism or oneness, is denied. What the religion of humanity ignores is that being human in the full sense requires seeking the truth of one's being in what is beyond the merely human. If this aspiration or vision of humanity is not allowed then what happens is this. Instead of rising above the human, one falls below it. Humanity, in this sense, is a staging post not a destination which is not to lessen it but to see it in its proper context of spiritual transformation. It seems to be inevitable that if a human being does not seek to transcend himself he will fall into a lower than human state. Not animal which is a worthy, natural state but sub-human. Many of the demons belong to this category.
From a spiritual perspective, the most important human faculties are the will and the imagination. In modern man, both of these have been corrupted. The will is no longer oriented to God as it is in a spiritually healthy human being. It points towards self. And the imagination has been crippled by materialism with the result that the images that feed it are not based on symbols of the divine but, increasingly, those that derive from the infernal regions. Look at so much of modern art, music, film and general culture. Isn't it obvious where this comes from? Imagination now is not called to higher levels of being but spiritual debasement.
The modern age has been marked by the desire to liberate the human will from its 'enslavement' to God, rejected (irrationally) as irrational. What lies behind this supposed search for freedom is actually egotism with truth bent to suit the agenda of the autonomous ego. What results is not freedom but increased enslavement to the restrictions of matter. There is no freedom in matter. Without spirit there is only darkness and death. The human imagination has fallen into darkness and can only rise out of that when it opens itself up to transcendent reality. Re-polarise your will to the truth of God and allow your imagination to receive spiritual light.
Sunday, 5 January 2020
The Last Judgement
I've been thinking of late about the picture in The Last Battle that shows all the inhabitants of Narnia and other countries of that world at the Last Judgement.
This isn't a very good reproduction but what it shows is the time at the end of time in Narnia when the world is dismantled and put back into chaos. It has run its course; its work of soul-building is over and all the Narnians are making their definitive choice. Aslan stands at the doorway that leads into the higher worlds and as every being rushes towards that doorway, away from the destroyed world, they look into his face. What they see there either fills them with love and they rush through the door or else horror or fear or disgust and they veer away to the left (their right) into darkness. An important point is that they make the choice. Aslan is not judging them. They are judging themselves. He just stands there and is himself.
I believe that something like this might very well be what we will experience. It presumably won't be quite so obvious as a door with light and darkness on offer but it will be simple. And though it will be Jesus who stands there I don't think it will be the Jesus we are familiar with from art. Perhaps a face or a light to which we will respond with joy or rejection based on our inner spiritual state. It will be an instinctive thing, thought or analysis or deliberation will not be involved. We will see love and glory as a fire but, as I said in a previous post, fire can warm and illumine or burn and destroy. Our choice will be determined by what we are inside and we will turn to light or darkness.
I am more and more convinced that this is a time of decision. Yes, I know people have always said the end of the world is just around the corner, right from the very start of Christianity. But really the signs are everywhere now from the widespread atheism and materialism to the secularisation of religion to the rejection of instinct and nature and common sense, and I could go on.
Regarding this latter, it is interesting to speculate why this might be. I think there are two reasons. The first, as I have often said here, is that when the Creator is rejected it is not long before the natural order of creation is rejected too. If it comes from nothing then it has no inherent meaning and you can give it any meaning you wish which is what we are doing.
But secondly, I would point to something less obvious. When intelligence is prized, as it is now albeit in a very restricted and limited form, and people are educated to think human intellect is the highest way to perceive reality then something quite odd happens. Unless this intelligence is balanced by faith it, as it were, goes rogue. People think in increasingly abstract ways. They embrace thought-constructed ideologies and abandon instinct which is perceived as a form of ignorance, superseded by mere braininess. This leads to a separation of the mind from reality. It is on its own, cut off by itself from its deeper source.
Human beings are meant to evolve from instinct to intelligence to intuition. The intellect is, therefore, a more advanced form of mind state than instinct. However, instinct is tied to reality in a way than rational intelligence is not. It falls in with truth (on its own level) unconsciously but it does fall in with truth. The intuition responds to truth consciously and is more advanced still but the intellect is severed from reality and has to approach it dualistically meaning there is always a separation from the thinker and his thought. This is not the case with instinct and intuition. There is no separation and therefore there is accommodation to what is. The human mind without instinct or intuition to guide it is on the outside of reality and cannot know it.
Intellect is purely human. Instinct is shared with the animal kingdom and the intuition is the mode of cognition in the true spiritual world. If we develop intellect but fail to develop intuition then we are at the mercy of all kinds of craziness. I mean that literally. Instinct keeps the ignorant on the right track. Intuition brings us into conscious harmony with God and the universe but intellect on its own risks a kind of insanity if we define insanity as an inability to see and live according to reality. In the past we were told that reason needed to be balanced by faith and this is wise for those who are developing mentally but have not yet grown into intuitive ways of understanding. Faith keeps you sane. But when faith is rejected and reason or, it must be said, so-called reason because much modern reason is unreasonable, assumes complete authority then the trouble begins.
Why have we not started to develop the intuition in any serious sense? Some people have but many more have not and these unfortunately set the agenda and run the world nowadays. This takes us back to the picture at the beginning of the post. They don't want to. There is a pride and self-will in them that rejects the idea of God and so they make no attempt to open their minds to higher things which is what you have to do if you wish to grow in intuition. If you want light to come into the room, you have to draw open the curtains. It seems that many people don't want spiritual light to come into their minds, at least not on the terms required. And that is down to pride. It is this refusal to open their minds to God which will make them turn away from His Face at the Last Judgement.
Where do they go, these people who have rejected God? Hell, but what is hell? I would say it is a reflection of their inner state of consciousness so their spiritual environment will be a manifestation of their own mind just like the dwarfs in CS Lewis's story who are in a beautiful place but think they are in a dirty, dark, smelly stable. If human beings disobey God's laws they will inevitably descend to a lower state of consciousness where they will remain until they change their attitude. This is not a punishment but a simple result of like attracting like. Hell is just the mind that has separated itself from God
Wednesday, 1 January 2020
Loss of Truth
I wonder if future historians will look back at the last decade and conclude that this was the time when the Western world finally went insane. I can only hope so as it will mean that some form of sanity has been recovered. Will they note that the condition had been building up for more than a century but in this period the evil seeds planted in, for the sake of argument (because actually the real seeds go much further back), the 18th century when faith began to be lost, finally flowered?
It is the loss of faith that is the root cause of the insanity. More precisely, for the West it is the loss of Christianity which entails the loss of belief in an underlying spiritual reality, a foundation of truth. When this sense has gone then there is no truth and we are free to make our own reality. But that is not real, not really real. It only depends on the whim of the moment. You're a man who wants to be a woman? No problem. Nothing is real so anything can be. Mind you, when a society has taken this attitude why should it stop there? I'm a cannibal. Why should I not be? Because you can do what you want as long as you'd don't hurt someone else. But why shouldn't I hurt anyone else? Is there a real reason, other than the purely utilitarian one, why I shouldn't? If it's just so that society can run smoothly without self-destructing, why should that concern me? I make my own reality. I can do what I want because, for me, there is no other reality. This can be taken to even more absurd lengths. There is no logical reason in a materialistic universe why I should not rob, rape, kill and so on. If there is no sub-stratum of reality, this should not be a problem, certainly not a moral problem. When nothing is real, nothing matters and this is the course we have set ourselves on. The denial of spiritual truth is the denial of any truth at all. When the human mind has no bedrock of truth in which to establish itself, it becomes deranged. We are only at the beginning of that period now because we have only just reached the point at which the legacy from our Christian inheritance has finally begun to run out. Previous generations may have, as they would have thought it, moved on from Christianity but they still operated in a world formed by Christianity and adopted many of its tenets. No more.
The real Christian influence is no more, or vastly reduced, but this means that a fake Christian influence can be introduced. Because Christianity is part of our history everyone has at least a superficial notion of what it is. But we no longer have any deep idea as to its proper meaning. Thus, we take its tangential elements, the ones that can relate to a materialistic world, and apply them, separating them from their spiritual origins and thinking we are taking the essential and just dropping the superstitious bits when we are actually doing the reverse. But because we don't acknowledge the spiritual, we simply ignore it. So, we can take love your neighbour and use that to create the kind of society in which proper qualitative differences and standards are erased. But we ignore love God which is the first and primary commandment from which all the others grow and without which the others are meaningless. We can take the idea of oneness in Christ, a spiritual unity of souls raised to a higher level, and distort that into egalitarianism, a kind of materialistic unity, a unity outside Christ, which denies the hierarchical nature of truth.
I have written on more than one occasion of how in the present age the devil is using the idea of love (love your neighbour, love your enemy) to destroy truth, and how the fact of oneness is used to deny the fact of difference. Many people are fooled by this and go along with it because they have no solid metaphysical foundations. Their beliefs are weak since they abandoned God and with Him the sense of an absolute reality. This means they can be herded in any direction chosen by the powers that seek to manipulate reality. In the past humanity has been led astray by hatred. That is still the case, of course, even though the hatred is generally disguised and presented as something good. However, in our day we are also led astray by a false idea of love. This is used to dismantle traditional societies with their basis in spiritual ideals which often have a separative element in them as there must be a separation between good and evil, right and wrong, truth and lies, the higher and the lower etc, and then rebuild in a completely materialistic form. It is a levelling down for materialistic oneness can only be on the most basic of levels, that of simple unformed matter.
What this amounts to is that Christian ideas that relate to this world are now used to subvert real Christian values which are rooted in the transcendent. This is like cutting down a tree and then presenting rotting apples lying on the ground as though they were fresh fruit on the bough. Christian ideas separated from God become in a short space of time these rotting apples.
All this having been said, it is nevertheless true that we did need to move on from the past view of Christianity as a religion of rules and outer authority to a new one in which faith, understanding and authority transferred from the outer world to the inner. We should have made the truth of Christ our own, progressing, as it is sometimes expressed, from the world of Peter to that of John. Our understanding of Christianity should have deepened to incorporate the idea of ourselves as sons and daughters of God, called to express that relationship in the fullest way. This means that Christ is not just up in heaven. He is also within ourselves and our job is to fit ourselves as a worthy receptacle for his light. This is all in the traditional understanding of Christianity but was rarely brought out into full view and shown to be the whole point of the religion. But we had reached the stage at which we should have started to become spiritual adults, leaving the childhood of faith. Faith is good and necessary at all stages of the spiritual path but it can develop into something more than simple belief into a deeper intuitive understanding.
Western Man has reached a critical point in ego consciousness and needs to advance from that. He has developed his individual ego, separating himself from an instinctive group consciousness, and with that the rational side of his nature. Now what he should be doing is start to progress to a conscious creative union with the Father, spiritual responsibility. Unfortunately, what he actually appears to be doing, in the mass and as things stand anyway, is falling back into the amorphous spiritual immaturity of the Mother, an unconscious union or return to Chaos, the state of undifferentiation. There are reactions against this but they are mostly on the ego consciousness level itself. We need to create a world in which the mature ego is able to transcend itself while retaining full individual integrity. That is the path laid out for us by Christ taking him as a kind of spiritual template.
We had to fall away from one form of spiritual belief in order to develop another in which inner understanding replaced outer acceptance. This should have involved a brief period of individualism, materialism even, quickly superseded by a higher spiritual life in which Man and God combine as they did in Jesus. Obviously not on such a high level to begin with but we should have embarked on that path. This is not what has happened. The individualism has become more entrenched because we have preferred self to God. That is what this is all about. We have preferred the little shrunken enclosed world of the separate self, the rebellious ego, to the greater world of our Divine Creator. And why? Because we have no love in us, no love for what is beyond us, a reality without which we would disappear as though we had never been. The only way to move out of the insanity of the present time is to develop this love and that means to forget ourselves and return to God, seeing ourselves this time as sons and daughters of the Father, able to grow into ever deeper communion with him. But recall what he said through the one he sent to bring us back to him. "If you love me, keep my commandments."
It is the loss of faith that is the root cause of the insanity. More precisely, for the West it is the loss of Christianity which entails the loss of belief in an underlying spiritual reality, a foundation of truth. When this sense has gone then there is no truth and we are free to make our own reality. But that is not real, not really real. It only depends on the whim of the moment. You're a man who wants to be a woman? No problem. Nothing is real so anything can be. Mind you, when a society has taken this attitude why should it stop there? I'm a cannibal. Why should I not be? Because you can do what you want as long as you'd don't hurt someone else. But why shouldn't I hurt anyone else? Is there a real reason, other than the purely utilitarian one, why I shouldn't? If it's just so that society can run smoothly without self-destructing, why should that concern me? I make my own reality. I can do what I want because, for me, there is no other reality. This can be taken to even more absurd lengths. There is no logical reason in a materialistic universe why I should not rob, rape, kill and so on. If there is no sub-stratum of reality, this should not be a problem, certainly not a moral problem. When nothing is real, nothing matters and this is the course we have set ourselves on. The denial of spiritual truth is the denial of any truth at all. When the human mind has no bedrock of truth in which to establish itself, it becomes deranged. We are only at the beginning of that period now because we have only just reached the point at which the legacy from our Christian inheritance has finally begun to run out. Previous generations may have, as they would have thought it, moved on from Christianity but they still operated in a world formed by Christianity and adopted many of its tenets. No more.
The real Christian influence is no more, or vastly reduced, but this means that a fake Christian influence can be introduced. Because Christianity is part of our history everyone has at least a superficial notion of what it is. But we no longer have any deep idea as to its proper meaning. Thus, we take its tangential elements, the ones that can relate to a materialistic world, and apply them, separating them from their spiritual origins and thinking we are taking the essential and just dropping the superstitious bits when we are actually doing the reverse. But because we don't acknowledge the spiritual, we simply ignore it. So, we can take love your neighbour and use that to create the kind of society in which proper qualitative differences and standards are erased. But we ignore love God which is the first and primary commandment from which all the others grow and without which the others are meaningless. We can take the idea of oneness in Christ, a spiritual unity of souls raised to a higher level, and distort that into egalitarianism, a kind of materialistic unity, a unity outside Christ, which denies the hierarchical nature of truth.
I have written on more than one occasion of how in the present age the devil is using the idea of love (love your neighbour, love your enemy) to destroy truth, and how the fact of oneness is used to deny the fact of difference. Many people are fooled by this and go along with it because they have no solid metaphysical foundations. Their beliefs are weak since they abandoned God and with Him the sense of an absolute reality. This means they can be herded in any direction chosen by the powers that seek to manipulate reality. In the past humanity has been led astray by hatred. That is still the case, of course, even though the hatred is generally disguised and presented as something good. However, in our day we are also led astray by a false idea of love. This is used to dismantle traditional societies with their basis in spiritual ideals which often have a separative element in them as there must be a separation between good and evil, right and wrong, truth and lies, the higher and the lower etc, and then rebuild in a completely materialistic form. It is a levelling down for materialistic oneness can only be on the most basic of levels, that of simple unformed matter.
What this amounts to is that Christian ideas that relate to this world are now used to subvert real Christian values which are rooted in the transcendent. This is like cutting down a tree and then presenting rotting apples lying on the ground as though they were fresh fruit on the bough. Christian ideas separated from God become in a short space of time these rotting apples.
All this having been said, it is nevertheless true that we did need to move on from the past view of Christianity as a religion of rules and outer authority to a new one in which faith, understanding and authority transferred from the outer world to the inner. We should have made the truth of Christ our own, progressing, as it is sometimes expressed, from the world of Peter to that of John. Our understanding of Christianity should have deepened to incorporate the idea of ourselves as sons and daughters of God, called to express that relationship in the fullest way. This means that Christ is not just up in heaven. He is also within ourselves and our job is to fit ourselves as a worthy receptacle for his light. This is all in the traditional understanding of Christianity but was rarely brought out into full view and shown to be the whole point of the religion. But we had reached the stage at which we should have started to become spiritual adults, leaving the childhood of faith. Faith is good and necessary at all stages of the spiritual path but it can develop into something more than simple belief into a deeper intuitive understanding.
Western Man has reached a critical point in ego consciousness and needs to advance from that. He has developed his individual ego, separating himself from an instinctive group consciousness, and with that the rational side of his nature. Now what he should be doing is start to progress to a conscious creative union with the Father, spiritual responsibility. Unfortunately, what he actually appears to be doing, in the mass and as things stand anyway, is falling back into the amorphous spiritual immaturity of the Mother, an unconscious union or return to Chaos, the state of undifferentiation. There are reactions against this but they are mostly on the ego consciousness level itself. We need to create a world in which the mature ego is able to transcend itself while retaining full individual integrity. That is the path laid out for us by Christ taking him as a kind of spiritual template.
We had to fall away from one form of spiritual belief in order to develop another in which inner understanding replaced outer acceptance. This should have involved a brief period of individualism, materialism even, quickly superseded by a higher spiritual life in which Man and God combine as they did in Jesus. Obviously not on such a high level to begin with but we should have embarked on that path. This is not what has happened. The individualism has become more entrenched because we have preferred self to God. That is what this is all about. We have preferred the little shrunken enclosed world of the separate self, the rebellious ego, to the greater world of our Divine Creator. And why? Because we have no love in us, no love for what is beyond us, a reality without which we would disappear as though we had never been. The only way to move out of the insanity of the present time is to develop this love and that means to forget ourselves and return to God, seeing ourselves this time as sons and daughters of the Father, able to grow into ever deeper communion with him. But recall what he said through the one he sent to bring us back to him. "If you love me, keep my commandments."
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