The Reality of Evil

 It is remarkable how few people nowadays can bring themselves to acknowledge the reality of supernatural evil. Could the reason be that if they did, they would have to admit the possibility of supernatural good and therefore of God? Do people not admit the reality of evil because then they would have to confess their sins, putting it in good old-fashioned terms? 

If you don't see the activity of evil in the world, since forever but especially over the last couple of centuries, it can only be because you have closed your mind to its possibility, and that may be because your worldview would then have to change so radically and you would have to accept spiritual responsibility. If you want to carry on without having your pleasant existence disturbed, indulging your favourite sins even if they are mild compared to some and not seen as sins by modern liberal standards, then you cannot acknowledge evil and that not only does it exist but it has an agenda.

It may be hard to see the activity of evil if you only look in terms of a limited timeframe as we are increasingly trained to do, divorced as we are from tradition and history, but if you stand back a little and take the longer view then it is blazingly obvious. Consider how our minds and attitudes have shifted over the last century or so. Bit by bit we have been moved further away from God and even nature towards an artificial this-world-only mindset that sees human beings exclusively in terms of their outer forms by which I don't just mean bodies but material selves including the mental and emotional aspects which are as material as the physical seen from the spiritual standpoint.

Go back 100 years, though it might just as easily be 200 or even 300 - this is an ongoing phenomenon, long in the preparation. You are a member of the devil's high command. You have to propose an agenda for the corruption of humanity, a fast track to damnation. I say fast track because it is that, given how historical movements normally proceed, but it may not seem that rapid to us in the context of our 70 or 80 years on this planet but that's nothing in terms of humanity as a whole. Your task is to introduce ideas that will gradually but increasingly separate Man from God, and you have to do so in a manner that to the naive and ignorant might actually seem good and as though they will improve society. What would you suggest?

• Firstly, you might try to undermine the reality both of God and religion by attacking those elements of religion that have accrued over the centuries but which are peripheral to the core message. You might get some clever people in the world whom you can influence because of their lack of faith or intellectual vanity or desire for prestige to formulate theories that purport to show there is no rational need for a divine Creator to explain the universe. They will not need to be wicked people but their flaws can be exploited. The attack on religion is made simpler because all religions really are now outdated so their flaws can be pointed out and used to undermine the whole.

• Next, you might suggest measures to dismantle the centrality of the family because the family is the reflection on Earth of a great spiritual fact. Undo it and you separate men and women from truth leaving them open to the lie. These measures will ostensibly be to protect or acknowledge people who fall outside the family for whatever reason, and to say they are just as good as those inside which may be true but is used as a means to destroy what is inside and an essential good. You might propose presenting ideas which see children as distractions or impediments to personal fulfilment instead of being the means to fulfilment which is the case. You might also push to extend the definition of the family, thereby destroying what it really is which is a father, mother and children that come from them by replacing it with what it isn't, all in the name of tolerance and inclusivity. It's a clever ploy to keep the outer trappings of something while replacing what is within as though it were still the same thing.

• Then you might deconstruct the past and seek to separate people from their roots. People without roots have no depth and are easily herded wherever you might want them to go. This could be through education on the one hand, and immigration, on the other, a two-pronged attack that obliges people to think of themselves in terms of a new definition of what a modern member of a particular society is because that is the only definition that will accommodate both the native and the stranger under just one umbrella. Attack the past to reframe the present in the style you want.

• You might suggest stimulating consumerism, that being the constant and insatiable desire to fill up a perceived emptiness as this fixes consciousness on the material plane better than almost anything else.

• Except sex. And so you would over-stimulate this to an absurd degree, separating it from love and making it absolutely central to all culture and much sense of self-worth.

• At the same time as stimulating the sexual instinct, you would propose dismantling the difference between men and women because then neither will be happy and society as a whole will start to break down as a result of it bending to accommodate something that is only possible when there is a lot of meat already on the bone. Feminism aka equality can only exist in a culture that has built up wealth and power so there is a lot to spare. Or else in a primitive culture which has nothing anyway. Otherwise it tends to be parasitical because it feeds off its host, the society in question.

• Then, in line with the consumerism, make it all about the economy. Make that the justification for everything and everything subsidiary to that. Money replaces God.

• And in case none of that is enough, why not attack, dismantle and break down beauty? Call the ugly beautiful and relativise everything in line with a general destruction of hierarchical values. All this, of course, in the name of unity, fairness and equality, the new anti-value values.

This is only a start and there is a good deal more that the devil can do, has been doing, to degrade human souls. For example, life over-stimulates us now to the point at which inner stillness is totally impossible for most people. We are always after the next hit and then the next and so on.  Our institutions, built to sustain and protect us, have been hollowed out and exist now as bureaucratic leviathans whose only real purpose is self-perpetuation. Even the spiritual, where it exists, tends to be a playground for the ego in many cases, captured and misrepresented as a means of human, i.e. personal, development.

All this is at the same time subtle but blindingly obvious when you know how to look. Surely we can see that everything is in one direction now? And it only ever goes further in that direction, despite occasional attempts at course correction. This should be enough to show us the source of the trends and where that source wants to take us. But then we would have to acknowledge the reality of supernatural evil and that would require us to confess our sins and turn to God.

The scale of the attack might seem overwhelming, given that it is everywhere and on every front. But the remedy is simple. Just see it for what it is. The devil likes to hide. Drag him out in the open by revealing his works and he loses power. Once his tricks are exposed he becomes impotent.

The Edge of the Circle

 The UK is currently going through one of its periodic political crises when the powers that be decide to swap one of their indentured servants for another in the hope that the public's dissatisfaction with its controllers will be ameliorated and everyone can start looking forward to a bright new future when everything will be different. It's one of those occasions when tragedy and comedy are hard to prise apart.

When will we learn that nothing can be changed for the better by politics or social action or anything that people actually do? Perhaps at one time that was not the case but it certainly is now. The state of our Western civilisation has reached the point at which everything external has been corrupted and anyone who climbs to the top of the greasy pole will have had to compromise their soul in some way or another. No exceptions. As I always say, this is not a counsel of despair or a reason to do nothing. It simply means that the source of the rot is spiritual and the remedy must also be spiritual first and foremost before anything else can change. If the root of the problem is not addressed than nothing will change and things will continue to decay.

Therefore we must ignore what goes on at the edge of the circle. We must return to the centre for only then will external issues start to correct themselves. Changing yourself is the most radical political action you can take. Not your ideas, though those too, but your very self which must be reoriented to God.

The Spiritual Crisis of Modern Man redux

 In a couple of months my new book A Survival Guide to the End Times will be published and I am reminded that I should promote and publicise it. For someone like me that's the least pleasant part of bringing a book to life, but obviously I understand the need for it. 

However, for now there's an earlier book I would like to draw attention to because it isn't included in the sidebar on the right. That's because it's a collection of posts from this blog so I published it myself through Amazon rather than submit it to a proper publisher. The title is the title of this post and that describes what the book is about. We are in a crisis. I would say almost everyone recognises this but by no means everyone recognises the cause of the crisis. It is our rejection of transcendence which is a fancy way of saying rejection of the spiritual. So, it is a spiritual crisis and that affects everything else because everything, absolutely everything, is downstream from the spiritual. If the source is poisoned then the water will be too. And we have poisoned the source.

The essays of this book are ranged under various broad headings such as God, Truth, Christ, Love, Morality, Evil, The Spiritual Path & Spiritual Practice and Modern Times. Then there are subjects like Buddhism, Non-Duality, Masculine and Feminine and the Masters which interest me but are narrower in scope. The message behind all of them though is that we are in a crisis of monumental proportions. There's no point in beating about the bush. One has to recognise this if one is to address its properly. That it is not acknowledged is why it is worsening which is the case.

As a matter of fact, this ties in with the new book. The spiritual crisis is an end times scenario. It is a product of the withdrawal of spirit and consequent dominance of matter which is what occurs when a cycle comes to an end and the initial injection of spiritual energy has dissipated to the point at which we are basically running on fumes. At the same time, this represents opportunity because although the end times affects everything we experience we still have the divine spark within us and the outer degradation can force us to rediscover this. When your world is collapsing you turn to eternal truths which can never be affected by phenomenal decay. That is what we must do to surmount the present crisis.

The book is available here and here in paperback and ebook form.

World Gone Wrong

A good indication that this is a fallen world is the existence of insects that feed on human and animal blood. I would speculate that when God created the various forms of life it was a law that each group maintained itself by feeding on lower forms. Thus, plants absorb nutrients from the soil in which they grow, animals consume vegetable matter and humans can eat both meat and plants. I have left out carnivorous animals here but that is, as it were, a horizontal process. And it too may be the result of the Fall. Possibly there were no carnivores in the prelapsarian world or, if there were, they ate less evolved forms of animal life.

Be that as it may, bloodsucking insects are something else. We instinctively feel the wrongness of such a thing, and not just because they irritate us and spread disease. We recognise there is something unholy and corrupt about a lower form of life feeding on a higher form. One might even put certain bacteria and viruses into this category of lifeforms not created by God but instead being the product of the deforming of life by the dark forces and/or wrong human thought which has its effect in the external world, particularly in the deep past when physical matter was not as dense as it is now.

Obviously, the materialist will write this idea off as complete nonsense but it is a plausible theory from the spiritual perspective. God did not create mosquitoes and similar unpleasant creatures. They are either the creation of the created (a physical instantiation of spiritual misalignment) or diabolical perversions like the orcs Morgoth made from elves in Tolkien's world. For the sake of this post I looked up when bloodsucking insects are first thought too have evolved and the answer is about 150 million years ago which would seem to put paid to the idea. But life on this planet has been around for a lot longer than we currently estimate as the earlier forms existed when the Earth was less material than it is now so have left no trace. When God created the world he pronounced it good but it has gone bad and one of the signs of that is the existence of lower forms of life feeding on higher.

In Siberia there are myths that say the mosquito arose from the ashes or fragments of some giant creature or demon. Similar tales are found in North American myth, with the mosquito arising from the ashes of a man-eater, suggesting a common origin. It is accepted by many people that myths do point to genuine realities so perhaps here we have a folk memory of the fact that not all life forms were created by God/the gods but some are corruptions in a world gone wrong.

Conquering Evil

 The scale of modern-day evil is extraordinary but many people are insensitive to this evil because, being spiritually based, it is not obvious to the materialistically minded. The majority simply look away as long as they personally are not suffering. But that is becoming less easy to do as one of the manifestations of modern evil is the destruction of Western countries which has now reached the point at which no one other than a self-deceiver can ignore it. Why do people deceive themselves like this? Is it just too uncomfortable to face reality?

When one looks around at how our countries are being deliberately dismantled, it's hard not to get angry. I won't go into all the ways this is happening. If you aren't aware of them by now you have not been paying attention these past thirty years. Or else you have an ideological commitment to ignore them because of political sympathies that could well be based, when you dig down to motivations, on resentful egotism. Western countries, which means Western people, are being systematically taken apart and this should make any right-minded person furious, chiefly with the people doing the destroying and only secondarily with those they use to do it who, for the most part, are ignorant, albeit self-centred, pawns.

However, let's take a step back. There has always been evil in the world and one can assume there always will be. It is the nature of the world that this should be so. It comes in peaks and troughs and we are certainly in a peak at the moment, but if we understand that we have come to the end of a civilisational cycle then we can see that the present situation is almost inevitable. 

With that in mind, what should our attitude be? First of all, as believers in the principle that the real life is elsewhere, we should preserve a measure of detachment. This world is on fire and that is nothing new. The fire is raging now but it has never ceased to burn. We can use that fact as a sign that we should turn away from this world and look for our true home in a higher world. At the same time, we cannot just take a passive, laissez-faire  attitude to the present situation for if we are alive now and understand something of what is going on, we must respond in some way. Knowledge without action is incomplete. But what should this action be?

When we recognise evil, we must do something about it. It is easy (or should be, see above) to see the evil in the world but evil exists within ourselves too. Therefore, the point at which we should start is to set about conquering the evil within ourselves. You cannot fight evil with evil. If you try to defeat evil in the world from a point of spiritual unawareness, you will likely do more harm than good. Put your own house in order first.

This doesn't mean wait until you are perfect before you do anything. If that were the case, you would never do anything. But make sure that what you do comes from a point of spiritual understanding rather than worldly rage. You may appear to be less effective but you will be aligning yourself with the spiritual powers instead of their adversaries who can easily co-opt behaviour that has not submitted itself to a proper spiritual focus.

There is a balance to be struck between, on the one hand, knowing we are living in the dying embers of a civilisation and accepting that cannot be turned around, and, on the other, doing what one can to preserve as much as possible of the good, the beautiful and the true, perhaps only to act as seeds for future revival rather than to revive the present age which may be impossible. The nature of the Kali Yuga is that it ends in collapse. However, that is only external. The real battle, as always, is for consciousness, and that is what we should be working to maintain, support, preserve, uplift and salvage.

My (Current) Favourite Symphony

 I suppose Mozart is the greater composer but I often prefer Haydn. There is an innate goodness about his music and it appears there was about him too. Portraits show a kind looking man and reports about his life confirm this impression. He was widely regarded as a good and honourable person, and noted for his particular modesty, generosity and warm heart. He was a humble man with deep faith in God to whom he attributed his artistic success. All in all, a completely admirable person, very unusual for a great artist!

I have recently worked my way through his entire symphonic oeuvre, 104 official ones plus a couple of late discoveries, and there is not a dud among them. Some are obviously better than others, and the later works certainly show development. Quite unlike pop musicians who have usually done their best work by 25, Haydn carried on improving and was composing some of his greatest works at the end of his long life. But there are pieces of genius throughout the canon. I particularly love the last movement of the 29th symphony, a joyous presto rush to the line which is at 12.33 here, but there are countless other examples one could give. The middle period Sturm and Drang symphonies are very fine with their early hints at a Romantic sensibility expressed through the subtle use of counterpoint and dramatic contrasts.

English readers of a certain age will know the Ladybird books, short hardback books for children of about 50 pages which introduced their youthful audience to a variety of subjects from fairy tales to British history and wildlife. I remember as a small child being entranced by the Ladybird books of Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter, all beautifully illustrated. There was also a Ladybird book of classical composers and that may have been where I first heard of Haydn. It's certainly where I first heard of classical music. I remember reading that the experienced listener could even tell the difference between Bach, Mozart and Beethoven which seemed incredible to me then! 

This was when I was very young. Some years later when I began to explore classical music I remembered this book and bought LPs of some of the recommended works such as Bach's Brandenburg concertos, Mozart piano concertos and Beethoven symphonies and piano sonatas. I also bought Haydn's Surprise Symphony in a performance by Herbert von Karajan which would probably seem very heavy-handed to me now. But then I enjoyed it immensely. It is deceptively simple, incredibly tuneful and the perfect piece for a classical newcomer.

It's a pointless exercise, playing the game of favourites because there are so many possibilities and one's tastes change. I would certainly not say that the Surprise Symphony is better than Beethoven's Pastoral or Mozart's Jupiter or Dvorak's New World just to mention symphonies with names, but at the moment it is the one I am enjoying the most. The Andante 2nd movement is the famous one with the surprise which I won't describe in case you haven't heard it, but all 4 movements are wonderful with a fleet-footed joy to them. Elitists may turn their noses up at what Charles Ives called "Nice little easy sugar-plum sounds", but that's their bad luck. Haydn doesn't plumb the depths of a Beethoven or Wagner, that was not his era, and some may mistake his fluency for a facile shallowness. However, his music breathes sheer natural goodness, and that is sometimes the best thing to experience.

A Sojourn in South India

 I've made another blog specifically for all the posts about my time in South India between 1980 and 1985 that come under the Indian Story label on this blog. It is called A Sojourn in South India and can be found here. So far I've just put a couple of posts up from this blog but I will gradually add more until they are all there, and then I will add any new post to this new blog.