Soul Loss

 The well-known Alice Bailey books are a development of Theosophy though with greater emphasis on Christ than Blavatskian Theosophy, even if he is still not the Christ that Christians know but a kind of grand hierarch. But then, since the assumed source of these books is Buddhist, that might be expected. Also, we must remember that Theosophists were often reacting against the 19th century version of Christ, a time when he was well on his way to his conversion to humanitarianism and starting to lose his purely spiritual qualities. So, when they downgraded Christ that may have been part of an attempt not to be bound by the developing materialism of Victorian Christianity.

That admittedly large failing aside, by most other criteria these books are impressive. Their sheer volume for one. Then their wisdom. Yes, I do think there is much spiritual wisdom in them though that doesn't mean I agree with all that is there. I also think they come from a reputable spiritual source though I would guess that there is a fair amount of Alice Bailey and her own ideas in there too. Maybe she was impressed on a non-verbal level and clothed the ideas in her own words. Or something along those lines. But there is a happy medium between complete acceptance of these writings on their own terms and total rejection. I accept what makes sense, and a lot does, reserve judgement on what seems to me to be doubtful, and reject what I think is wrong. I haven't looked at the books for a long time, and I'm not sure I've ever read one all the way through, certainly not A Treatise on Cosmic Fire. But using the index to pick and choose was a helpful way to approach them for me, and the compilations that condense the several thousand pages to manageable proportions are also useful.

I bring this up because in a recent comment on Bruce Charlton's blog in response to a post on AI I wrote that "the real basis behind all these developments (in AI and computer technology in general) is spiritual destruction, going beyond mere atheism up to and including the destruction of the spiritual component of our being which I believe is possible when we reach the point that we totally deny all that spirit is."

My point was that for a long time many developments in technology and thought have supported the denial of the soul, the aforementioned spiritual component of our being. AI is the latest and most serious. Every time we get on board with one of these developments, all the way from simply not rejecting it to accepting it gladly as a real advance, we play into the hands of the forces of spiritual destruction. To a certain extent, it doesn't matter if we think we don't believe in God as long as we act, both mentally and in day to day life, as though there was some kind of spiritual reality to our being. For example, we might revere beauty or believe in free will. These are something though probably not enough. But they are something. But every step we take away from the soul, and embracing AI is a giant step in that direction, the more we lose contact with what it stands for, and the more we do that, the closer we are to severing our connection to it completely. To losing our soul.

After I wrote my comment I was reminded of something in the Alice Bailey books so I looked it up. Here's what she says. It actually comes from A Treatise on Cosmic Fire though I took it from The Soul, the Quality of Life which is one of the compilations I spoke of above. I've edited it slightly.

"If man neglects his spiritual development and concentrates on intellectual effort turned to the manipulation of matter for selfish ends, and if this is carried on for a long period, he may bring upon himself a destruction that is final for this cycle. He may succeed in the complete destruction of the physical permanent atom and sever his connection with the higher self for aeons of time. We must emphasise the reality of this dire disaster."

This warning comes in the context of discussing occult work and saying it must be undertaken in the light of spirit and guided by love and unselfishness. Consequently, it might be considered irrelevant in terms of the current scenario. But I would maintain that computer technology is a form of magic, and its development is motivated by the same ungodly impulses that motivated the black magician. Any attempt to bend matter to our will that is not guided by spirit is illicit. By the same token, any behaviour that denies the soul is selfish which may be an unusual definition but is true on a deeper level than the normal one. From a spiritual perspective, selfishness is acting according to the earthly self - even if the earthly self considers itself to be spiritually motivated, a common phenomenon. That aside, the more we deny spirit, and AI is the denial of spirit almost by definition, the more we cut ourselves off from it, and there may come a time when certain people who go all the way into this dark place cut themselves off entirely. The tragedy of the modern world is that the whole culture is sending us in that direction.

Thoughts on the New Pope

 It's understandable that Catholics are happy they have a new pope. A page has been turned and there is naturally a feeling of optimism for the future. Not being a Catholic, I have a slightly different perspective. It may be that the pope makes a difference to rank and file religious Catholics, but from the deeper spiritual perspective the pope is irrelevant. I know nothing about the new incumbent but while a good pope is better than a bad pope (though different people will define good and bad differently in this context), the pope is merely the representative of an outer institution. That institution may carry some spiritual force derived from the inner worlds, but in and of itself it is an outer thing which means it is of the world. This is even more the case in our day when all outer forms have less contact with spirit than has ever been the case - and that includes all religious institutions and organisations.

The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but cannot tell where it comes from and where it goes. So is everyone who is born of the Spirit. No doubt this can be interpreted in various ways, and clever theologians will bend it to say what they want it to, but its essential meaning is obvious. Spirit cannot be put in a bottle, any bottle. Some bottles are beautiful and some are cunningly fashioned but even those that hold refreshing liquid cannot hold more than a limited amount, and people who wish to drink deeply from the well of life must go elsewhere. The great problem in being a Catholic is that you have to be a Catholic. That is to say, your Catholicism must take spiritual precedence over your own connection to God. But God created you. He did not create the Church. Even if you believe Matthew 16:18 as interpreted, God is certainly in you more deeply than he is in the Church. For the ordinary man or woman it may be enough, but for those who wish to know the mysteries of existence more fully there is a point at which adherence to an outer structure becomes spiritually limiting.

I'm writing this for those who already, in some part, agree with its premise. I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything they don't believe, and any faithful Catholics who come across this piece will reject it out of hand which is fine. But for those who have doubts, I would say use the church as support if you wish but seek the deepest truth within yourself. You are made in God's image. The church is not. It may be able to guide those who cannot yet find the spirit within themselves, but it is not the living image of God as you truly are.

The time has come when God will only be found by those who are willing to break barriers and cross frontiers. I do not mean this in a rule-breaking or antinomian sense, but in the sense of going beyond the everyday. It is the pioneers exploring new land who will find God not those who remain in known territory. This is not an excuse for individualism or anything that goes against nature. What was unlawful remains unlawful. However, new wine cannot go into old wineskins, and the Catholic Church, like all churches, is an old wineskin. You don't have to reject it because the truth that was in it remains in it, and transcending something means seeing it in a new light, from above, not necessarily rejecting it completely. But you do have to expand beyond it.

This can be a dangerous doctrine because not everybody is ready to strike out into the spiritual wilds. However, the rewards if you are and if you can do so with humility and wisdom are commensurate with the risk. It may be the new pope can reorient the Catholic church to its traditional self, though I personally doubt it. In any case, in our day, that is no longer enough.

Mysore and Secunderabad

When we realised that we would not be able to buy a property in India we had to reassess our situation. While living at the Shilton Hotel we had become friendly with several fellow long-term residents. One was a German called Max who worked at the Goethe Institute in Bangalore. He had an Indian wife who took a great shine to Michael and he called her for some reason known only to himself, because it certainly wasn't her name, Petunia. Here they are together in the grounds of the hotel.

Another acquaintance was also given a soubriquet by Michael though this one had some kind of rationale to it. This gentleman was the ex-Iranian ambassador to Switzerland who had gone into exile after the Iranian revolution when the Shah was deposed a couple of years previously. It must have been quite a comedown, from being an ambassador to living in a middle ranking hotel in India, but he seemed to take it all philosophically. He had lost his wife, and his daughter was still in Iran so he was by himself. His daughter did come out to see him while we were there and she was a totally Westernised woman in terms of education and dress, but now she had to cover her head when in her own country. Unlike her father who seemed to accept the situation in his homeland, she had a decidedly fiery attitude to the new regime. When asked what she thought about it she drew her finger across her throat and said "I want to kill them!". One forgets how Westernised Iran was under the Shah, though maybe it was only the case for the educated elite.

I don't remember the ambassador's real name but it was something like Monsieur Mogadon. I give him that title because his French was better than his English so we spoke to him mostly in French, a language in which Michael was fluent, having lived there for a while in his childhood, and I was reasonably competent, having done it to A level standard. Michael called him Moggie which delighted him and they used to play cards together in the evening. Here is a photo of Michael, Moggie and Max in Whitefield with a flame of the forest tree in the background. 

Inspired by Michael, Moggie had also bought himself a solar topi.

Here's a photo of Moggie and me in the same place.

We were in Whitefield because after we found out we couldn't buy the bungalow we decided to move there anyway. We rented a small house with a little garden for 6 months, and some of our Bangalore friends would occasionally come by to visit. However, we still needed to find a more permanent solution and an Indian friend suggested that Michael apply to the Maharajah of Mysore, a friend of whose grandfather he had once known, for a job of some kind. Over 40 years later this seems a strange thing to have considered, given our original purpose in going to India, but Michael wrote to the Maharajah anyway and he replied quite quickly suggesting an interview. So, off we went to Mysore.

In fact, we had visited Mysore on a day trip earlier as it's not far from Bangalore and is one of the more interesting cities in Karnataka state. It's famous for its palace which is a mixture of the magnificent and the kitsch. Designed by an Englishman in the early 20th century in the Indo-Saracenic style for the grandfather of the current (in 1980) Maharajah, it combines European and Indian influences for a result that is undeniably impressive but veers towards Disneyland on occasion. More to my taste were the 1,000 year old Sri Ranganathaswamy Temple in nearby Srirangapatna and the 18th century summer palace of Tipu Sultan.

We arrived at the palace for the interview with the Maharajah and were inevitably kept waiting for an hour or so. This was only to be expected as the hierarchy must be enforced, but eventually a servant arrived to tell us that His Highness would see us now. This caused Michael to crack a smile and he told me as we progressed through dark passages to meet the Maharaja that his father, who was a large man, had been affectionally known as His Heaviness. When we got to the royal chamber we could see that the family propensity for a generous girth had passed from father to son. The Maharajah was seated on a throne raised on a platform with his petite wife sitting at a lower level, more or less at his feet. Here's a picture of the two of them at their wedding about 4 years previous to our meeting.

He motioned to us to be seated on a bench about 15 feet away from him and asked if we would like some refreshment. We thanked him at which a servant brought us some coffee in one of the metal cups often used in South India. Then we saw why the Maharaja might have got to be the size he was. He was given four cups of coffee and a whole chicken. Rather than drink the coffee, he just poured it down his throat, one cup after another. Then he ate the chicken with his fingers during which time we sat silently. When he had finished he asked Michael a bit about himself. Michael talked about his previous time in India as ADC to the Governor of the Punjab and the Viceroy, and the Maharaja nodded politely but there was no mention of any job. His wife didn't speak during the interview but sat silently staring ahead the whole time. I was asked my name but not much more. After about 20 minutes the Maharaja indicated that the interview was over. We got up, thanked him and were escorted from the palace. We never heard anything more. It was all rather strange.

Michael's second attempt to get some kind of job was almost as odd as the first. Someone told him that the club at Secunderabad was looking for a new secretary. Clubs in India were an inheritance from British days when people would get together after a day's work to socialise and drink. The game of snooker was invented by a British army officer in the 19th century in an Indian club. Michael wrote to the Secunderabad Club offering his services, and they asked him to come for an interview. I was against this because, as before, it seemed to have nothing to do with our reason for coming to India, and I had no interest in being a hanger on in such circumstance. But by this time we had been in the country for several months and all our plans had come to naught so I agreed to give it a go and see what transpired so we went to Secunderabad.

Secunderabad was a twin city to Hyderabad, the two being separated by a large lake, but they have now more or less merged into one. However, originally Secunderabad was developed by the British while the old Indian city of Hyderabad was ruled by the Nizam who at one time had the reputation of being the richest man in the world with jewels the size of eggs. The nearby mines of Golconda were renowned for producing diamonds in the 17th century amongst which was the famous Koh-i-Noor now set in a British Royal Family crown and on display at the Tower of London.

We stayed at the club for a couple of days and it was very pleasant as you can see from these pictures, still run as it would have been in British times with a strict dress code and servants waiting on your every whim.

But it was not why we were in India and when it turned out that the club was not looking for a secretary after all I was pleased though I did wonder why on earth they had asked us to travel over 300 miles to inform us of that. We returned to Whitefield to see what might happen next.

I have not mentioned the Masters but they did occasionally speak to me through Michael at this time. I would never have asked them what we should do, that was up to us, but I believed we would be guided and such did turn out to be the case.

Atheistic Idolatry

There's been some recent discussion in the part of the online world I inhabit on AI and its usefulness or otherwise. I haven't much to add to the wise words of William James Tychonievich, Frank Berger and Bruce Charlton, but I would reinforce all that they say. As far as I am concerned, AI might have some value for students wishing to submit essays without actually doing any work or learning anything, but, from the spiritual point of view, it is not just a negative but something approaching a Satanic snare. 

What is the point of something that knows everything but understands nothing? If knowledge does not come from a place of understanding but what is effectively a void then it can only be harmful, harmful to the mind and harmful to the soul. For it is not the informational content of knowledge that matters so much as that from which it arises. In the case of a human source that would be a living mind. It is the mind that gives food for thought. There is no nourishment in AI for the knowledge it provides comes from emptiness, and anything that comes from such a source is devoid of truth and light. AI is the endarkenment of the human mind, and that is not even going into its potential for demonic exploitation.

Note: I took the idea of AI being a form of idolatry from Bruce Charlton.

In Bangalore

 After a few weeks in Bombay (see previous Indian Story posts), we took the train to Bangalore which we intended to use as a base from which to explore the south of India, our idea being to buy a property to run as a small guest house. The journey took about 24 hours, and we arrived late at night with no plan as to where we might stay. Somewhat misguidedly, we put ourselves in the hands of a taxi driver at the station and, given we were Westerners and not hippies, he took us to what was obviously one of the most expensive hotels in the city. Being too hot and tired to go anywhere else at that time of night, we booked a room there but the next day after making a few enquiries, we transferred to a place called the Shilton Hotel which was in St Marks Road, and this was to be our home for the next month.

The Shilton was an old fashioned hotel which had rooms in small individual buildings spread out over a compound which is what you call a garden in India. The trees and flowers in the south were all new to me. The main tree, which lined roads all over the city, was the Flame of the Forest which puts out bright red blooms when it flowers so that the tree really can appear, especially at sunset as though it is on fire. There was one of these in the compound, in flower when we arrived, and there were also several beds of canna lilies which are also red though there are orange and yellow varieties too, all very different to the more subdued English flowers I was used to. 

Bangalore was favoured by the British because its elevation on the Deccan Plateau at nearly 3,000 feet above sea level gives it a relatively cool climate, cool for the South of India. The British established it as a cantonment town, meaning an army garrison, and from that beginning it became a Civil and Military Station, developing into one of the more attractive cities in the country with many fine buildings, both state and residential. The cantonment was established in 1809 for a mixed civilian and military population and comprised bungalows, gardens, race courses, clubs and parade grounds. It stood apart from the main Indian city with a definite colonial air and there was still a trace of that remaining in 1980. All of these colonial houses were attractive and some were really quite grand. Alas, most of them have been pulled down now in the usual acts of cultural vandalism to be replaced by ugly modern buildings, but in 1980 there were still a large number around the city, with many in the area where we were staying.

Michael had been a captain in the Guides regiment of the Indian army in pre-independence days when it had British officers, and he dressed accordingly, favouring khaki shorts with long socks and heavy Afghan sandals which he called chappals. All topped off with a solar topi, the pith helmet that the British wore during colonial days. I certainly wasn't going to dress like that but he did insist I wear a hat while in the sun for which I am grateful as many Westerners in those days didn't and suffered the consequences. I wasn't going to wear a topi but a cotton cricket hat offered sufficient protection. I never wore sun cream the whole time I was in India. People didn't in those days, no doubt unwisely.

After a short period looking for properties we found a bungalow with enough rooms for a few guests in the small town of Whitefield, about 15 miles from the centre of Bangalore. We fixed on this as Whitefield was the site for one of the main ashrams for Satya Sai Baba so there was a constant stream of Western visitors. At that time it was just a small village with some old bungalows and a few modern houses, a sleepy little place where nothing much went on except for the ashram. Now, since Bangalore has become the IT capital of India, it has been completely transformed. See here. One can either admire the industry that affected this transformation or be horrified at the wholesale destruction of a pleasant rural village with no building more than one floor high, and its conversion into a giant temple to Mammon.

Before we left the UK we had visited the Indian High Commission to ask if foreigners could buy 'immovable property', as it was called, in India, and we had been assured they could. All that was needed was the appropriate permission, and that was just a formality. Consequently, we didn't anticipate any problems in buying the Whitefield bungalow. We were wrong. We hired a lawyer (always a risk in India) to make the application, and were told the necessary permission should be granted in a couple of weeks. The two weeks turned into a month and then 6 weeks and then we were informed that permission was refused. The formality had become an impossibility.  We re-applied, wasting more money on the lawyer who was probably just stringing us along, but permission was once again turned down and we had now wasted 3 months. Later we found out that if we had greased enough palms at the ministry in Bombay we might have been successful, but either through naivety or integrity that did not occur to us, even to Michael who was familiar with Indian affairs and knew you could basically trust no one. Indians are generally very kind and friendly but the fabled spirituality of the sub-continent rarely extends to the moral sphere. Actually, the owner of the property we had been hoping to buy was an exception to this rule. He had kindly taken his house off the market while we were waiting for permission to buy, and we felt we had let him down but he was philosophical about it, and held no ill-feeling, even inviting us to dinner. The moral of the story is that generalisations are generally true but one can't assume them always to be so. I met many kind and generous Indians while in the country. On the other hand, we were ripped off and cheated several times. This was just the first. 

Back to square one. While waiting for permission to buy the house in Whitefield we had moved out of the Shilton to somewhere cheaper. The costs mount up when living in a hotel, even in India.  In fact, we only moved a few hundred yards to a guesthouse called the Bombay Ananda Bhavan which means Bombay Bliss House. This wasn't what you might think from the name, being a perfectly respectable establishment run by an old gentleman by the name of Mr Gupta. It was situated down a side street called Grant Road just off the main strand on which the Shilton stood, and was a two storey bungalow with a dozen or so rooms. I found some pictures of it on the Internet from about 10 years after we were there but it looks exactly the same.

The entrance

A bedroom with mosquito nets

The first floor balcony

The guesthouse was used by devotees of Sai Baba and they would take taxis twice a day to his ashram 15 miles away for darshan which is when the holy man graces his disciples with his presence. Michael and I were the only people in the guesthouse who were not devotees. For those who don't know, Sai Baba was a popular guru in the 80s and beyond who claimed he was God incarnate in human form. He had a large afro and wore a long orange dress which was peculiar to himself, not traditional garb. His main claim to fame was that he had magical powers. He could produce objects out of thin air and regularly did so, often holy ash but also sometimes small religious artefacts etc, even gold. I don't doubt that he really could do this. He wasn't just a sleight-of-hand prestidigitator. I am equally sure that he was not a genuine holy man. For one thing, no true holy man indulges in this spiritual showing off of miraculous power. The siddhis, as they are known, are regarded as diversions and stumbling blocks to the seeker, and to display them is spiritual vulgarity on a grand scale. Then there was his claim to divinity. This is another sure sign of inflation and inauthenticity. But most of all, as far as I was concerned, the vibration he gave off was decidedly unholy. I am not going to include a picture of him but look it up if you are interested and see if you don't agree that this is not the face of a holy person. There were scandals that surrounded him even at the time but I won't go into those here. 

Having said all that, the Western devotees we met at the guest-house and elsewhere were all good and decent people, sincere, albeit naive, spiritual seekers. Sai Baba was obviously an exceptional individual but a good example of how you must exercise discrimination while on this path. The devotees were constantly asking Michael and me to go with them to a darshan, and eventually we did. I have to say that all my suspicions were confirmed by the sight of Sai Baba coming out to the awe-struck crowd and, in lordly fashion, accepting their love and unconditional adoration with benevolent condescension. He produced some vibhuti or holy ash, took a few letters with requests for blessings or whatever, and then after a brief period went back inside. That was enough for the devotees who had taken a round 30 mile trip for a 15 minutes mass audience, and were prepared to do the same again in the afternoon. "He cured my diarrhoea!", one young lady told me excitedly. I was only 24 at the time and somewhat concerned that my feelings about this man were totally at variance with what most other spiritually inclined people thought of him, but Michael told me to trust my intuition and go by what I felt, and I have to say this is excellent advice for anyone whose instincts point them in a certain direction, even if good opinion is against you.

To be continued.

The Winnowing of Souls

I expect the next few years to include tests for the soul that become more and more finely tuned. The soul must eventually be made perfect, and if that seems a tall order, it is. However, the eventual perfection is not ours but God's, and acquired through his grace. All we have to do is be true to God, and to the actual reality of God not our chosen interpretation of that reality. This is what the tests are there to uncover. They are there to examine the deeper responses of the soul, beyond the merely intellectual level. They seek to unveil and reveal the heart. The true heart can be made perfect through the transformative power of God but he needs good ground in order to plant his seed.

Some of the tests will be conventionally spiritual. Do you believe in God or not? But that is just the beginning. What sort of God do you believe in? Why do you believe? What do you seek as a result of this belief? Is God more important to you than anything else, including, obviously, money and power, but also reputation and even family (see Matthew 10:21). Is it a holy God you believe in who acts for spiritual reasons and ends or is it a nice God who loves his children as they are now and accepts everyone for who they are, without requiring inner conversion, sacrifice and repentance?

Some have to do with the world. How do you see the world? How do you see the body? Do they have importance for themselves or as expressions of God and the soul or, perhaps, a mixture of the two? Some are to do with courage and response to stress, some are to do with taste and response to beauty and ugliness. Can you tell them apart? That seems an easy test but many people cannot in our day.

The purpose of the world at this time is to separate the sheep from the goats. The tests examine the mind but principally they examine the heart. The world seems real because it must do to make the tests real. But actually the world is not real in its own right. It can, and eventually will, be transformed or raised up into spirit but at the moment it serves as an environment for learning, and one of the things we have to learn is to reject the world as the world while, at the same time, love it as part of God's creation. That's an easy balance to strike if one perceives from the heart because what is, is, but it may be complicated for the intellectual mind which likes to partition and sees things in either/or terms instead of both/and.

We have it on good authority that not everyone who acknowledges God, of thinks they do, will enter the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 7:21). This is what the tests will pick out, the straight from the crooked, that which is true all the way down from that which is merely true on the surface. By their very nature the tests will be unexpected and require choice. Sometimes they will require sacrifice. They are a kind of mass initiation, and initiation is always preceded by tests and trails. So, be prepared for what is to come.

It's Not Real, Any of It

 And yet it is. This is the perennial puzzle the spiritual aspirant has to solve. He must walk a fine line on a tightrope with a big drop on either side. Is the world real or does the deeper reality of spirit render the material world ultimately unreal? The Two Truths theory in Buddhism addresses this problem but not entirely successfully as Buddhism cannot acknowledge the abiding reality of the individual self. Nonetheless, it does seek to come to terms with the difference between absolute and relative reality, giving each its place in the overall scheme of things.

I believe we make this more complicated than it need be. It's reasonable to assume that everything is real but some things are more real than others. The structure of life is hierarchical, and just as an amoeba is less than a man but still entirely valid on its own terms and in its own right, so we can say something similar about this world and the spiritual one. This world is real on its own level, and it is even real viewed from the spiritual level too but less so. It must be seen in the light of the spiritual to be understood properly but the fulfilment of its purpose requires it to be seen in its own light as well. If I sat by the roadside and did nothing all day because the material world isn't real then I would die, and would have wasted my earthly existence. That existence has a purpose which is developing the self, to which end the world must be taken seriously. I might return to the spiritual world if I denied the reality of the material to the extent that I  neglected it entirely but I would have failed in my earthly purpose. To opt out by denying the reality of the world is to defeat the vision and goal of spirit which is to become more conscious. more creative, more God-like, God being whole and perfect in himself but able to become more whole and more perfect by investing himself in a world of this and that, here and there, me and you.

Learning to keep one's balance on this path and walk straight will reveal to the aspirant the meaning of what reality is, and how it affects his life in the world. The relative may be a lower order of reality than the absolute but it is still part of reality and with the absolute makes up the whole. Just as spirit needs matter in order to know itself more completely and explore its own depths more fully, so God and the world are part of a mutually supporting totality - even if the world only exists because of God.

Everything is real but there are higher and lower realities. All reality comes from God and he is the height and centre of reality, but he is God so what he creates is fully real even if it is less than him.