The Four Ages of Tradition

 I write a lot about the end times these days and that is for two reasons. The first is that we are deep in them though that has no implication as to how long they might still have to go before their inevitable conclusion in collapse and, probably, destruction. It could be 2082, it could be 100 years hence or more. It doesn't matter. All that matters is to be aware of them now and take steps to build our own inner ark which simply means to recognise and love God, and then see this world not as true in and of itself but as the outermost station of divine being which has its place and its purpose but is not our real home. As for how long they still have to run, that is not our concern. We are in them and that is all we need to know. If we knew when the end times were destined to conclude that would artificially alter our response to them. Our hearts would not be properly examined. That is why Jesus says only God knows.

The second reason is that everything about the modern world, literally everything, its many minuses (spiritual) but also its pluses (material), and its art, culture, science, politics, religion and lack of it, can be explained by the end times. Once you understand what these are and what brings them about and how they conclude you understand pretty much everything about the world today. Even how it could not be other than it is though that is not to excuse the factors and individuals that bring it about. Just because the end times are inevitable does not mean that those who facilitate or go along with them are anything other than God-rejecting sinners who will suffer the consequences of their thoughts and actions.

But let's go back to the beginning and put the end times in their proper context without which they have little meaning.

According to all traditional thought, human civilisations degenerate over time. How can this be, you say, are we not kinder, more tolerant and more advanced in every way, moral and material, than ever before? No, we are not. You see, you only say this because you are a materialist even if you are ostensibly a believer in one of the religions or some other form of spirituality. I will explain. We are more moral in what relates to man as he is in this world because we have rejected the higher reality of the next world. We have made great advances in what pertains to the material world, including human relations in that world, because we have denied the spiritual world and man as primarily a spiritual being. Energy follows thought. Our thought is all in the material so that is where our energy goes. 

Obviously, the past was far from perfect but, to the degree that it honoured God, it was better than us. And since God is the highest truth, to deny that truth and its implications (because you can believe in God but believe in this world more which means you don't really believe in God), means that however advanced you are in material terms you are still in an inferior place to one who honours God. Past cultures including our own in the West left a great deal to be desired but they were better than us because, however imperfectly, they paid tribute to a higher reality.

This is the traditional view. We do not progress but decline and this decline takes place over the course of four distinct cycles or ages. Before proceeding with this thought, an increasingly familiar one, I should add that I do not fully go along with it. There is a decline in the spiritual state both of humanity and of the physical and psychic environments in which we exist. That is true. However, there is also an evolution because the ages have a purpose. They are not just (though they are this too) an example of entropy in action. As the environment thickens and we become separate from the higher worlds, we are thereby forced back onto ourselves and we start to develop ourselves as more individual beings. We become less spiritually conscious but more truly individual with greater powers of both thought and self-expression. We move from passive beings swimming in the ocean of consciousness to a more active, though separated, mode of existence. God wants us to be free and independent, in effects, gods. This we cannot be without a strong sense of self, and not just a sense of self but a developed self with its own powers, talents and expressible attributes. This self inevitably becomes fixated on itself. It loses contact with its higher being because it must in order to develop, but that does have a spiritually adverse effect, and as the ages go by and the self further descends into separation its spiritual condition worsens. This is where we are now.

So, there is an explanation for the descent. However, that does not justify fully succumbing to it, and this is important to understand. Yes, conditions are adverse but still at all times we have the voice of God within us, and just because that becomes harder to hear is no excuse not to hear it or, at least, make the effort to listen out for it. It is only those who have hardened their hearts against God who reject him. We are never left without teaching, and you might say that the available teachings now deep in the end times are more abundant and more accessible than ever. This is one of the consolations of our time.

In the present grand cycle mankind has gone through three previous ages and is currently at the tail end of the fourth. In the Golden Age we walked with the gods and listened to their words. We were not perfect but we were in tune with the universe and in harmony with God. But then conditions began to cloud over and the division between this world and the higher planes started to harden so interchange between the two became more difficult. The gods began to retreat. In a way, it was the end of the nursery stage and the beginning of the move to adulthood.

We now live in the Iron Age which represents the nadir of human spirituality and therefore of civilisation and culture. We do not know precisely when the Iron Age actually began but for the sake of argument we can say it was about 5,000 years ago which is the beginning of historical time. So quite a while back. The Iron Age itself has cycles reflecting gold, silver, bronze and iron states of consciousness, and we are now at the end of the final cycle within the overall Iron Age as is demonstrated by the fact of our total materialism and atheism, our material accomplishment, our addiction to and absolute dependence on materialistic technology, our rejection of both God and Nature, our perpetual state of decline, denied publicly but obvious to anyone, and the sense of finality felt by many. Add to that globalisation and the destruction of nations which that entails, the fact that both science and art have lost their way, environmental degradation, uselessness of leaders, institutional collapse and a host of other things from the ongoing battle between the sexes to the general meaningless of life, and you can only draw one conclusion.

All this may seem negative and depressing but it is not a matter for doom and gloom. Quite the reverse, in fact, for the end times can be seen as a period of great potential, even hope. The outer world may be on fire but that drives us within. It gives us the tools to reject materialistic illusion and seek the real. The death throes of our current old world are merely the birth pangs of the new. Nothing good, nothing true can ever be lost. The good seeds of the past will be saved and replanted. The bad crops will be taken away and the ground prepared for a new harvest. No spring without winter.

Today we are addicted to technological devices that separate us ever more from God and reduce the quality of our experiences which become increasingly etiolated in nature. We are jaded and dulled. What we thought would liberate us actually saps our psychic vitality. This is unmistakable signature of the end times. 

And yet despite the fact that we live in a dying world this is an extraordinary time to be alive. For those who can read the signs, the opportunity for spiritual progress is greater than at any other time. Even a little effort in the right direction will be rewarded precisely because it is so much harder. Those who seek to establish a relationship with God and who are pure in heart will successfully pass the test of these times. Those who fail will be kept back at lower levels of being but I would surmise that missed opportunities will not present themselves again for some time as these things have cycles. It's not a question of being cast into a fiery pit but of going where your heart and mind take you which means to a dimension of being that corresponds to your heart and mind. This tells us that the conventionally religious are by no means guaranteed to be saved just because of their beliefs and desires. It is the quality of those beliefs and desires that matter. Moreover, belonging to any particular church or religion means very little now. The time has come when an individual response to God is required. An institutional response belongs to the past. We must think for ourselves. This is what it means to be an individual. Traditionalists might regret that if they are attached to the old institutions but the sabbath was made for man not man for the sabbath, and now each person must forge his or her own inner relationship with God to be saved.

Today we are living deep in the end times or Hesiod's Iron Age, the Indian Kali Yuga. Our task is to reject the illusions of the material world, now stronger than ever, and seek God, but it must be the true spiritual sun that exists both within and above us not one of the many imitations that are present at such a time. For when the material is as strong as it is now there arise many false spirituals which are themselves part of the material because they are just pure reactions to it. This is the task we face. Not simply to reject the material but to be able to discern true gold which is rare in the world from the many varieties of fool's gold. The spiritual is not the opposite to the material but in consciousness terms completely transcends it.

In the Iron Age values are inverted so we praise the lesser and scorn the higher. We call evil good and good evil. The whited sepulchre wicked are honoured and rewarded while those attempting to tread the path of virtue are ignored or derided. However, even these latter will become contaminated to a degree by the qualities of the Iron Age so the best course is to participate in the modern world as little as possible. Most of us must live in it and use its tools but we need to be fully aware of the corrupting nature of the world today and detach ourselves from it as much as we can. Do not get sucked into resisting it as the current will be too strong and you will be drawn into the very thing you fight against. Let it take its course knowing that God has everything in hand and his purpose will be served simply by you directing your whole attention to him. This is not defeatist because the world is dying and it is dying because it has lost its connection to higher principles. Just recognise that and stand back. The death of the world is not a tragedy but a necessary part of its purification and regeneration.

The end times will progress into disorder and collapse but there is a purpose to this collapse because it creates the conditions for rebirth. It forms the souls of men and women who can be the seeds, whether literally or, more probably, spiritually for a new age. It will be a simpler age because it will be a fresh start but not entirely fresh because the best of the past will be preserved on the level of consciousness. Now the sins of centuries are coming to the surface like erupting pustules so they can be lanced so think of the end times as a time of mass purification. That is what they are. Is this not a wonderful thing? Humanity is being cleansed so it can start anew in a fresh cycle. Some souls will go to higher worlds, some will be recycled and some who have failed here will go to dimensions of being appropriate to their level of consciousness.

Civil War

 To continue the theme of the last post, the sad reality is that certain factions of Western men are complicit, either knowingly or unknowingly, in destroying their own group. Putting it in political terms, you have elements of both left and right piling up the logs for the funeral pyre. Mass immigration is the most obvious tool used, and this is promoted by the globalist elites who merely think of humans as homo economicus, fodder for the marketplace, and also by leftists who, for reasons of perverted ideology (a tautology since ideology by definition is perverted as it's what you have when religion is abandoned), push their obsession with equality to the limits of sanity. The one is driven by greed, the other by anger and resentment as we discussed in an earlier post. Here we see how the anti-God forces behind all this take advantage of human sin, their preferred modus operandi, stimulating it wherever it already exists.

Is Britain really on the path to civil war as some are beginning to predict? This is no longer the impossibility it would have seemed 20 years ago. You have the refusal of the elite classes to defend the idea of a shared national identity as they import vast numbers of foreigners who can have no sense of loyalty to or even understanding of the history and heritage of the country to which they are coming. And in response to this you have a growing sense among the indigenous native population that they really are beginning to lose their country. These people are condemned by most of the mainstream (in hock to the elites who control both government and press) in all the usual ways as ignorant, racist, etc, etc, but these stigmas no longer work against people who see their cultural identity rapidly being destroyed.

And then you have Islam.

Muslims can never assimilate with anyone else. That is a basic tenet of their religion which is not so much a pure religion like Hinduism or Buddhism as a political ideology with a religious component which aims at complete totalitarian control, both externally in the community and internally in the mind of the believer/victim. Romantic Westerners like to imagine Islam in terms of the Alhambra Palace, the Taj Mahal, the Golden Age of Baghdad, beautiful gardens and wise Sufis, and there is certainly this aspect to it. Some of the architecture is stupendous, the Abbasid Caliphate was responsible for an extraordinary cultural expansion and Sufism is replete with profound mystical insights. But the Golden Age was done by the end of the 13th century and Sufism, which is considered heretical by most orthodox Muslims, did not get its insights from the Koran so much as advaita, Christianity and pre-existing Persian spiritual teaching. More to the point, none of this is what Islam means now. It's not just a simple monotheistic religion like a non-Trinitarian version of Christianity, but a political ideology that has sought to destroy everything that stands in its way from the beginning. Muslims, who make up an increasingly large section of the population, cannot assimilate. It is against their religion to do so. They also have a long history of spreading their ideology through the sword. That is their tradition.

The spiritually corrupted elites tell us that diversity is strength, in total contrast to historical reality. Moderate diversity can be a strength if there is a common centre, a shared identity and a high level of social trust, but that is precisely what is lacking. National identity has been trashed and replaced with a spurious (spurious because no one feels this in their blood) all-purpose liberalism that is the same everywhere. But incomers keep their identity and it seems inevitable there must be eventual conflict. When has that not happened?

If conflict does arise the elites will blame everyone but themselves. They will condemn the people whom their policies put in an impossible situation rather than admit those policies were utterly wrong. The incomers, flushed with numerical power, will reject the time-honoured wisdom, and, frankly, common courtesy, of when in Rome do as the Romans do. They will seek power, at first democratically but eventually by any means. I believe this is what the demonic powers have been working for all along. It is, therefore, something we really need to avoid, and the only way to do that is to get tough now before the situation gets out of hand. 

We must remember though that the reality behind all this is spiritual. It is bad to lose your country. It is worse to lose your soul. War creates hatred. Well, it comes from hatred but it lets that hatred rip. It is spiritually extremely dangerous for that reason. It's all very well to teach as Krishna taught in the Bhagavad Gita that if you remain detached you can do your duty in war without fear of spiritual consequence. Krishna is right but most people are not capable of that, and war unleashes and seemingly justifies terrible, spiritually destructive, passions. Christianity is not a pacifist religion because it recognises that we live in a world in which evil exists and must be dealt with, but nor is it a martial religion like Islam. War must be a last resort for a Christian and we need to recognise how the demonic powers are trying to manipulate us and take steps to prevent the outcome they are working towards. This will mean hard choices and strong actions but better that than war. The fact that the demons are working towards it shows we should work to avoid it, but we cannot avoid it by refusing to confront the problems that are leading us towards it. The corrupt elites will pay a spiritual price. The rest of us should do what we can to prevent ordinary people being dragged down with them, but the time has passed for all purpose peace and love. These should still be there, of course, but now they will have to take a more rigorous form, one which bends more towards the justice of the father than the mercy of the mother.

I must make one final point to put this all in a wider framework. The elites are plainly wrong and the new arrivals who seek to usurp power are also wrong. This does not mean the native peoples are right. The situation has come about because everyone has abandoned God and truth. If one is not acting from awareness of the spiritual then one's actions are contaminated. If one does not think from an understanding of God one's thoughts are degraded. There is national loyalty and there is spiritual (spiritual not religious) loyalty. The former is right and good but if it is not seen in the greater context of the latter it will not lead to a healthy outcome.

File under wars and rumours of war.

Why Was Western Man Selected for Destruction?

 It certainly seems that way. In almost every situation nowadays the white male is seen as the villain, and has been for at least 20 years. This is despite the undeniable fact that the white male is responsible for almost all modern advances, and that's using modern in its widest sense, going back several hundred years. Is this just the jealousy of the resentful or has that been utilised and exploited for a deeper purpose?

I was recently sent this link and asked for my opinion. It's a familiar trope. China, India and the Islamic lands all had great civilisations when Western Europe was an uncivilised backwater (what about Greece and Rome?). Why did Europe and not these areas develop modern science? The answer supposedly is that Europe took a great deal from these more advanced civilisations, stole, some might say, and that therefore its achievements are not really its own but dependent on those who came before.

Of course, there's some truth in this. Europe did acquire knowledge from other civilisations, but to go from that to saying its achievements are less as a consequence, and to surmise that these could have happened elsewhere, given slightly different circumstances, is to make completely unwarranted assumptions. There was something about the Western European psyche that advanced everything, not just science, but everything, the arts, philosophy, ethics, medicine and much more, to places other civilisations had not dreamed of. No one disputes that other civilisations had some sort of science and that they inspired Western scientists, but they all got so far and no further because they lacked something which the West had. Not so much raw intelligence but they lacked what we call now, after Spengler, I believe, the Faustian exploratory spirit of Western man. 

This refers to the ever-restless search for truth, the expansive attitude that is never satisfied with the known but seeks to go beyond all boundaries and to understand everything; in religious terms, certainly, but not only in religious terms. Just as important, this was coupled with (or perhaps they are part of the same thing) the strong sense of individualism that Western Man developed and a greater devotion to rational enquiry than displayed anywhere else, even in the great civilisations of India and China. Revisionist historians who put Western superiority (which exists in all fields) down to luck or trade networks or exploitation or to geographical advantages are promoting minor and secondary factors to the main one. And they are often doing this in bad faith to support their undeclared ideological prejudices.

 So, why is Western Man subjected to the relentless undermining of the present time? Those who look only from the outside might say it is because Western Man has caused many of the problems of the modern era, and they would point to ill-treatment of other groups, destruction of the environment and similar faults to substantiate this, ignoring the fact that every group has done this kind of thing, given the opportunity, and Western Man is actually the only grouping to acknowledge it and seek to do something about the problem. Another theory might be that the underperforming groups who have reaped the benefit of Western Man's discoveries and advances resent this fact and spitefully seek to bring him down.

Both of these have a degree of truth but they are not the real reason. The reason Western Man, or the white male, is subjected to relentless attack is spiritual, using spiritual in its broadest sense to include all that is non-material. This attack originates from the demonic level, from a centre that seeks to separate humanity from God and exploit it for its own purposes, principally as a source of energy. To do this most successfully they need a conformist, relatively supine population.  White males are the freest, most individual, most focussed on the pursuit of truth and excellence grouping of human beings. They are the ones who will fight for truth. Women are not particularly concerned with truth, preferring security and consensus and a situation where everyone is comfortable. They cannot defend truth and are not designed to do so. That is not their role which is why they are encouraged by the powers that shouldn't be.  Non-Western men are not overly concerned with truth either, principally seeking wealth, power and status. Of course, most Western Men are the same but there is still a significant proportion who seek and will fight for truth and excellence. It is because of this grouping that white males are targeted and undermined with accusations of racism and sexism, neither of which, be it noted, are sins in themselves, being merely legitimate observations of real differences. But no matter. If white males are removed from the equation humanity will become much more susceptible to demonic misdirection.

This is not to absolve white males or Western Man of his faults. But to focus, as we do, entirely on these is to miss his real and vital contribution and, above all, the protection his particular mindset affords to those forces that would lead humanity astray.

Added note: One might also point out that the quality of Western Man has deteriorated over the last 100 years so he is partly complicit in his own undermining.

Virtue

 Every virtue has a complementary virtue which stops the excesses of the first virtue turning into a vice. Mercy and justice is one obvious example. Tolerance and adherence to truth is another while humility and strength is a third pairing of virtues with one filling in the gaps of the other and curbing its tendency to fall into a deformed version of itself. You might add patience and resolve which stops patience drifting into apathy. Then there is compassion which without discernment falls into sentimentality. Each virtue naturally suggests the other and if it doesn't for any individual, that means that its motivating impulse is in some measure deficient or even defective.

It is the same with divine qualities such as love and truth. One without the other leads first to imbalance then disorder and finally to evil. When virtues are seen as emanating from the reality of Christ they will automatically include their balancing opposite because Christ is the central sun from which the virtues originate, and they are like rays. They don't exist in their own right. He exists and they come from him. When severed from the reality of Christ, the supposed virtue loses its spiritual force and becomes a caricature of itself, often ending up as a path to sin.

To be spiritually creative virtue must operate in a proper metaphysical structure which incorporates a sacred centre. The virtue must both express the quality of that centre and be a means of guiding the human soul towards union with it. This is why the virtues without Christ are sterile and then potentially destructive. I am not saying that only a professed Christian can have these virtues but it is easier for a professed Christian to do so because he knows whence they arise. This is also why virtue in the Christian world is followed because it is right whereas in Eastern religion virtue is often just part of technique and a means to an end rather than a justification in and of itself. If the goal is Nirvana the virtues are meaningless except as a way of facilitating that goal. If the goal is Christ the virtues become both means and end.

The modern world has lost Christ but kept some of the virtues associated with him, but cut a flower from its stalk and pretty soon it withers and dies. This is increasingly apparent where the virtues are concerned, and now they are often used as a way of attacking their source. This is a natural outcome of a thing being separated from its founding principle but it has also been exploited by the forces of darkness. There was no need for it to have gone this far for a humanity that was not looking for excuses to sin or a justification for hatred and resentment. Evil is using decayed good to advance its own rotten agenda, and there is no excuse for those who go along with this because in their hearts they know what they are doing. Some may be dupes but no one is innocent. That is the nature of these times when the heart is being examined.

Some Objections to the End Times Idea

Many people are resistant to the notion of end times. For some it's just defeatist pessimism that serves no use other than to encourage negativity and despair. Others reject it because the idea is Christian even though it is universal in one form or another. Then there are the people who say that the world has always had problems, wars, famines, disasters of various sorts. In reality, we are much better off now than we have ever been.  

I can see some justification for these attitudes as negativity and pessimism do exist, and it can't be denied that, in many respects, we are better off than ever before. At the same time, none of that changes the reality that the signs we are approaching some sort of collapse, both spiritual and material, are very clear, and it requires a degree of almost wilful blindness to ignore them. I speak in terms of the West as that is what I know but I strongly suspect that where the West leads everyone else will follow. Materialism and atheism are rampant everywhere, and these are the two key significators of the end times. They have never been as pronounced as they are now. Add to that the fact that religions have all reached a point of spiritual exhaustion. There may be good still left in them on some levels but real spiritual good, salvific good, is draining away. Alternatives to religion are widespread but so many are shallow, without real substance, almost as if they were designed to catch those fleeing materialism as part of a two-pronged attack on the soul. 

Critics might assert that writing about the end times is fear-mongering and provokes anxiety during global crises, but they miss the point that if the end times really do exist and we are in them we had better know how to respond. To ignore a situation can be fatal. One always operates best from a position of understanding. It is quite true that fear-mongering paralyses people but spiritual preparation enables us to face what may come from a point of inner strength and knowledge. If the house is catching fire isn't it wise to point that out so steps can be taken?

 

Doubters would also say that people have claimed they were in the end times on many occasions over the centuries with nothing untoward happening. Perhaps, but past error does not excuse ignoring obvious warning signs in the present.  The object in writing about these things is not to convince anyone of anything they don't already believe but to support those who feel something is amiss and would like to make sense of it all. At times like these when the outer world and its institutions are crumbling, understanding why it is happening and how to respond becomes critical.

 

People also react against the idea of end times because it seems sensationalist and that's fair enough. It is an emotive phrase, but what it really means is the end of old, unsustainable ways of living. The end times are only about external collapse on one level. On a deeper level, what they call for is an internal spiritual upgrade. I'm not entirely happy with that expression because of its mechanical connotations but it serves to emphasise that, in the face of the breakdown of outer structure, we need to discover the light within and build an internal sanctuary. That is a big task not, as it might sound, a glib catchphrase. It requires daily practice of prayer, meditation and the retuning of the soul. It demands clarity of thought and purity of motive which sounds simple but is a lot to ask of any human being and needs a strong degree of honesty with oneself and ability to look into all the dark corners of the psyche with humility and detachment. But it will pay dividends because the more you centre yourself within, the less you will be damaged by fear or anger or any one of a number of negative responses to outer turmoil.

 

Another objection that might be raised is that if we are in the end times and everything is predestined to collapse, why should people bother trying to improve the world or put things right? In that case, isn't talking of spiritual survival just a form of escapism?

What matters is state of mind, the one thing you take with you when you leave this place. One should always try to make things better and not turn one's back on destruction and decay, but we can take an analogy from human life. We try to heal the body but there comes a time when we have to accept the inevitable. Saying this is the end times is not saying, do nothing. Do whatever you feel called to do. Things can always be made better in some way, and passive fatalistic acceptance will guarantee that nothing will ever improve. At the same time, you should know that cycles have beginnings, middles and ends and there are strong indications that we are in the end part of a particular cycle. You can make that as good as it can be but you cannot alter the trajectory of a cycle. 

Looking at the world today from the spiritual perspective shows we are in some kind of crisis. That is what I mean by end times. How long this period will last and what comes afterwards, nobody knows. The period may last a long while or not. Outer collapse may come in some form, great or small, external destruction from comets may even come as some speculate, but none of that really matters. The essential point is that we live in a world that has lost contact with God. We have sought to become our own God and that is to invite consequences. At such time each individual must seek to realign his being with the word of God. That is all the phrase end times means. God has been chased from out there so now we must look for him in here.

 

The Seven Deadly Sins Today

The unholy alliance between a globalist capitalism that treats human beings merely as economic units and a leftist ideology that insists everyone is equal is destroying the West, something no doubt intended by their demonic sponsors. The one is motivated by naked greed, the other by envy which leads to hatred as you can easily see by its reaction when scratched or even threatened. These forces are extremely powerful in the modern world, supported as they are by the political system, the media and the establishment in general whose only interest is self-preservation. Even so, they can be resisted, not always outwardly but certainly inwardly which is what matters if one would defend one's soul from spiritual attack. The question is how?

To begin with, do not try to attack them on their own ground. They have sewn up the discourse so if you use their own framework and language to challenge them you will fail as both of these things have been designed to render their position impregnable. You have to disregard the assumptions they put forward as baseline truths and introduce a new approach that starts from a new standpoint, one outside their assumptions. And that is a simple three part question. "What are we, where do we come from and where should we be going?"

Neither capitalism nor the liberal ideology that has given rise to modern leftism can answer any part of that question but until you do you cannot understand how life should be lived. The answer to the first part has long been known but is currently ignored. A human being is made up of body, soul and spirit, and any culture or civilisation worthy of the name must take this threefold being into consideration, dismissing no part of it. Any that doesn't will collapse. And once you have answered this first and primary part answers to the other two parts will follow.

The seven deadly sins are pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth. You can see from this list that the primary drivers of the current state of Western civilisation are the second and fourth but pride and wrath are also big motivators for the globalists on the one hand and the leftist activists on the other. Traditionally, greed or avarice is countered by charity or generosity and envy by kindness, and this is interesting because the major players often disguise their true motivations by  exploiting the good in these virtues which they wear with ostentation, so much so, in fact, that charity is now often seen as a form of self-promotion and kindness as a mask for destructive impulses. And while all this is going on, the populace is stimulated by the media to lust and gluttony and a large segment of it by the ruling powers to sloth (ever greater dependence on welfare payments).

It seems that the seven deadly sins are in full play today but when have they not been, you may ask. Certainly, they are always there as a basic part of human nature but they are now often actively encouraged and are becoming increasingly acceptable in our modern world. Is this not yet another indication of the end times? I don't offer this as a black pill as it is termed nowadays but, perversely enough you might think, as a sort of encouragement. The rewards for those who see through the lies and hold fast to the truth will be great. This is the test of our times.

The 2026 Eclipse

On 11th August 1999 there was a solar eclipse which was about 90% of totality in the south of England where I saw it. This coming 12th August there is another eclipse which will again be seen at about 90% of totality in much of the British Isles. The 1999 one was at 18 degrees of Leo and this one will be at 20 degrees of Leo which might seem a coincidence but apparently has something to do with how sun, moon and Earth realign over multi-year cycles.

Be that as it may, there is still a significance to this phenomenon. I have long thought that the 1999 eclipse was an important one in that it heralded radical change. It was the last eclipse of the 20th century, and something really did change with human consciousness in the new millennium. We became different people in many respects, moving from a mentality largely based on past thought and attitudes, though with modern influences, to one where modern attitudes became central and past beliefs moved out to the periphery to become fringe. This change has carried on ever since, not in a smooth and straight line as things never go like that, but with a direction of travel that is unaltered. You might say that this is always the way of the world but look at how so many fundamental beliefs that had endured in various forms for centuries have been jettisoned over the last 25 years. It is quite extraordinary.

Perhaps this new eclipse will bring that particular cycle to an end. Not that we will go back to how we were. That is neither possible nor even desirable, but some kind of change in mental attitudes over recent years might be expected. The end of one cycle means the beginning of another, and there will always be several other processes going on at the same time. Even so, I venture to suggest that, in Europe especially which is on the direct path of these two eclipses, changes might come in the coming months. I am not speaking in terms of improvement. This eclipse cycle, if such it be, is a minor event in terms of the greater descent into the Kali Yuga/End Times phenomenon and the forces associated with that and they will continue to gather pace. But it is still an event.

These two eclipses also interest me because of personal involvement. As those who have read Meeting the Masters will know, the 1999 one coincided with the death of my friend Michael Lord whose Jupiter was on the exact degree of that eclipse. Jupiter in my birth chart forms a very close conjunction to the degree of the upcoming 2026 eclipse. I take that in a positive sense.

Note: I am not saying that it was only the 1999 eclipse that prompted the radical changes that have occurred since 2000. Merely that it may have been one factor among several, and that the new eclipse may be bookending a particular period that started then.