Divisiveness and Unity

 Nowadays you regularly hear condemnation of this or that person or attitude for divisiveness as though to separate was intrinsically bad and to join in unity always good. You must respect those whose views are different to yours or society cannot get along, or so it goes. But here's the truth.  Divisiveness is good. It is even essential if you wish to preserve truth. I don't respect falsehood, I don't respect wickedness, I don't respect anything or anybody that denies the reality of God. To condemn divisiveness is a trick of the devil to get us to accept his degenerate and corrupt agenda.  We must separate good from evil, truth from lies, love from hate. But principally we must separate that which acknowledges God from that which does not. Then other things will follow. You don't love the devil and his works. You don't include them in a fatuous oneness. You reject them utterly as well as the souls that embrace them though with compassion for such souls for while you reject their error and the inner spiritual sinfulness that has led them into error, you still know them as potential sons and daughters of God if they can repent of the sins that have caused them to go astray.

Christ brought a sword, the sword that cleaves truth from lies. In that sense, he was the most divisive person who has ever lived but, at the same time, he also came to heal the division caused by the Satanic introduction of the lie. The devil seeks unity so that he may separate souls from God. Christ divides truth from the lie in order to unite souls with God on a higher plane.

I have posted this under the two tags of equality and non-duality for the former is a secular version of the latter. Both equality and non-duality see all souls as one and basically the same, but they miss the truth that true oneness can only be attained after division has done its work in separating out that which accepts God from that which rejects him. And note that the rejection of God is not just the deliberate refusal of him but also the lack of positive acceptance. There is the active denial of God and there is the more passive ignoring of him, and though the latter may be less spiritually destructive, it is still rejection. The lesson for souls in this world is not for them to realise the unity of everything in it regardless of what it is but to learn to separate good from evil and true from false. Through this separation one grows into true spiritual unity in the reality of God. 

Gravity and Levity

 What stops a soul ascending to the heavenly realms after death? It is its weight. A soul is literally held down by its weight or rises because of a lack of weight. In the physical world gravity is the dominant force but in the spiritual world levity takes its place and your spiritual lightness draws you upwards. 

What causes this weight? Several things but chief among them are attachment to the material world and sin. Sin is the main deadweight that holds the soul down. Lack of sin, or minimal sin since no one is entirely free of sin, allows the soul to rise. There must also be the positive qualities of aspiration and imagination which is the capacity to respond to the higher worlds, but attachment to sin and to material things are the major weights that pull the soul down and prevent it rising

Thus, you could say that gravity operates in the next world too but it operates in terms of consciousness.

What is the main anti-matter force? It is alignment of the mind with the spirit of Christ. This is something much more than belief in Christ. It is the assimilation of your soul with his.

Right and Left

 The cause of many of today's woes is often said to be rooted in the ever-increasing influence of what is loosely termed leftism, an influence to which politics, culture and even religion and science are submitted. It is the dominant ideology in the West. As the definition of the word frequently shifts in focus, it might be helpful to look at the underlying forces for what eventually becomes a tendency to right or left in an individual's mind. This takes us, as it were, behind the curtain and shows that what lies underneath an overt political position is something deeper, something that relates to our approach to reality and, ultimately, to God. I should add that most of what is called right today has absorbed much of the leftist ethos and become just a diluted form of its supposed opponent so you cannot identify public and political right and left with the way I am using these descriptive terms here.

In the end times things come to a point which means all souls must choose one side or the other. The famous sheep and goats. I am not saying anything so crude as right is good and left is bad because, as things stand, neither right nor left are spiritually healthy. Also, there are elements of truth in both sides as there must be since no one would willingly choose naked evil. But the good is often used to mask an underlying spiritual rottenness and an excuse to justify it. However, though the right is not in any way properly in line with the truth of God it usually does not directly oppose it as leftism, for all the ostensible good in it, almost always does.

These are the characteristics in a person which mark an inclination to right or left. They may be responded to on an instinctive level rather than adhered to overtly, and in the case of the negative qualities they will be dressed up to resemble something finer. But these are fundamental motivations that form an individual's outlook on life.

Right

Belief in God - Freedom - Love of something concrete whether it be country, religion, nature - Hierarchy - Truth - Common Sense - Primary motivation is for certain things - Respect - Honour.

Left

Rejection of God - Ideology - Control - Equality - Primary motivation is against certain things - Resentment - Rebellion.

A leftist will say this is prejudiced and paints one side in its best colours and the other in its worst. He will say it ignores the determining humanism of the left and its compassion for the needy and the downtrodden. And he will say what about the greed and lack of empathy of the right? By his lights he has a point but, as I said, I am trying to uncover what lies at the deepest level of leftism as its psychological motivation. No doubt, many leftists do feel themselves to be inspired by humanistic compassion, and perhaps, to a degree, they are, but if you go to a deeper level you will find the rejection of God and this is true even of religious leftists who will reinterpret God to fit their own desires. And as for the greed and lack of empathy of the right, I am not talking about economic systems here but moral and cultural standpoints which are much more important. There are materialistic forms of the right which are severed from their roots. These are irrelevant to my case. The left is always materialistic even when it is spiritual.

The first leftist was Satan, fired by envy and resentment of God. The first humanist was also Satan when he told Adam and Eve to disobey their Creator and seek to become gods themselves. This points us to the truth that the best definition of leftism may be that it is the rejection of God. Not necessarily disbelief in God because Satan clearly believed in God. But he rejected God because he wanted to put himself, his wishes and his desires, in God's place. This is the root of leftism.

Note: Everybody has everything within them. What matters is what predominates.

A Refreshing Fast

 I've recently spent 10 days away from the media, television, the internet, the "news", everything. Aliens could have landed and I probably wouldn't have known. A politician could have said something sensible. I've just been walking, swimming in the sea, eating freshly caught fish and drinking local wine. When you return to simplicity the absurdities of modern life are even more absurd but at the same time so ridiculous you know they cannot last. They are not like the rock in the first picture or the sea in the others, not parts of solid reality. They are seen as terrible aberrations but essentially trivial, even childish. They will be swept away eventually though they may do a good deal of damage before that happens. But they will pass.

This is one of the supposed sites of Atlantis before its destruction. I don't believe that theory because, for one thing, it is in the Aegean not 'beyond the Pillars of Hercules' (i.e. Gibraltar), and, for another, the volcanic eruption that put paid to the Bronze Age site in present-day Akrotiri was in the 16th century BC and Atlantis went down long before that. But archaeological digs have revealed a thriving, well-developed and prosperous prehistoric city that probably traded with Minoan Crete and ancient Cyprus, a major source of copper. Apart from the usual pottery vessels and, less romantic but more practical, advanced (for the time) drainage system, the site has revealed numerous beautiful frescoes such as the ones below.

Minoan City and Ship

A Fisherman

A Saffron Gatherer

All the men in the paintings have ruddy skin while the women are white which perhaps reflects ideas of masculine and feminine beauty. Or maybe the men just worked outdoors more. There are also pictures of blue monkeys, now in the local museum. When you consider these are over three and a half thousand years old it makes you curious to hear their music too. Would it have been of the same quality?

It's spiritually healthy to get off the internet completely and away from the world for a while but one can't remain lotus-eating for long or one becomes soft. That doesn't mean we should spend too much time online but we are here to overcome the world both out there and within ourselves, and so for now it's back to what is amusingly called reality.

It's a pity some of the pictures overlap with the text at the side but they look better bigger.

Repost 2: A Visit to an Ashram

 Meeting the Masters is mostly about a single year in my life, the year my spiritual guides made contact with me and the first year of my tuition by them. This was also the only year I recorded their messages in a systematic (or relatively systematic) way. During that period Michael and I made a month long visit to India which is described in the book. However, shortly after that we returned to India to live and we stayed there for five years, during which time the Masters continued to talk to me through the mediumship of Michael. It seems that part of the reason we went to India was that it was easier for them to do this. I doubt it's the case now but India, or the rural parts of it anyway which is where we mostly were, really was less materialistic than the West back then. Our teachers also wanted  to separate us out from the world for a spell so that we could devote ourselves to the spiritual quest without distraction. 

We spent the first few months in and around the city of Bangalore (now Bengalaru and greatly changed since 1980, its population having exploded from 2.8 to 14 million which means I have no desire to go back) before moving up to the hill station of Yercaud in Tamil Nadu where we bought a property which comprised two bungalows. This property was on the side of a hill with the bungalows on different levels of a terraced garden. We lived in the top bungalow and ran the lower one as a guesthouse. It only had three bedrooms and the season was relatively short but it gave us a small income as well as something to do of a practical nature. The Masters always encouraged me to keep myself occupied and not lapse into the sort of over-introspective mysticism which leads only to self-absorption. As they told me shortly after we arrived in Yercaud. “Work more with your hands so that you keep busy, and do not dwell so much in thought as that will only make you self-centred and inclined to lose yourself in speculation that goes nowhere. You will not gain the knowledge you seek through thought”. The Masters were practical mystics and that same attitude is what they seek in their disciples. Ora et labora, one might say. The correct balance between inner and outer is important on the spiritual path, and the Masters were always keen advocates of working with the hands which they saw both as a pure, i.e. natural and spontaneous, form of self-expression as well as a means of keeping the over-activity of the mind at bay.

"You will not gain the knowledge you seek through thought." That's precisely the opposite approach to the modern one. It does not mean that thought is wrong but it does tell us that spiritual knowledge is only found on a higher plane than the conventional mental one. Spiritual knowledge, as opposed to knowledge about spiritual things which is of the mental plane, may not be the only sort worth seeking but it is the most important.

Our bungalow in Yercaud

I regard those five years in India as the most important of my life but didn't include much about them in the book partly for reasons of space, but also because I wanted to focus on the words of the Masters as recorded during that first year. The following piece is something I did originally include but then cut out as not particularly relevant to the main thread of the story. It's not without interest though, and I hope earns its place as a post in the blog.

'This is not a personal history so, although there are many other things I could write about our time in India, here is not the place to do it. However, I might mention a visit we made to the ashram of Bede Griffiths, the Christian monk who had adopted the lifestyle of a Hindu sannyasi. Michael and Bede Griffiths had a mutual acquaintance who had given us a letter of introduction and so one time when we were travelling in the vicinity of his ashram, we decided to pay him a visit. By one of those little quirks of fate which implies that someone on the other side has a sense of humour, it transpired that Bede Griffiths had that very day gone to Yercaud where we lived for the funeral of a fellow Catholic priest. However, he was expected back the next day and the people at the ashram kindly said we could stay there. I recall that the ‘bed’ we were offered was basically a slab of concrete jutting out from the wall, resembling a shelf you might put pots and pans on more than something you would want to sleep on. Still, you don’t go to ashrams for the creature comforts. The site itself was idyllically situated on the banks of the sacred river Kaveri, the Tamil equivalent of the Ganges, and though the life led by the devotees there seemed simple to the point of austerity, the natural beauty of the place more than compensated.

   Father Bede came back the next day. With his long white hair and beard, barefoot and simply dressed in an ochre robe, he looked every inch the holy man. We talked to him for an hour or so and it was clear that his appearance was a true representation of what he was which is by no means always the case. He had been a pupil and friend of C.S. Lewis and we spoke a bit about that. I've forgotten our conversation but there is an interesting article about the two here.

 I very much liked Father Bede but I did have some reservations about his ashram and the form it took. The church was built along the lines of a southern Indian temple with statues of Jesus and Mary in the form of Hindu deities which made it look like something out of an Indian Disneyland. We went to a service which was half Mass and half Puja and, although conducted with obvious sincerity, seemed to me to be fundamentally misconceived. When you mix the outer elements of religious traditions you end up with a hybrid that may preserve something of the externals of both but has nothing of the inner nature of either. Truth may be beyond form but form can express or misrepresent truth, and if you try to blend traditions that have grown completely separately, you lose most of what matters and are just left with a caricature of both. It is true that religions have borrowed from each other and that, for example, the now unmistakably Eastern form of the Buddha owes much to Greek influence but when a religious iconography and ritual has taken on a settled and defined form, to mix it up with that from another tradition completely and negates its whole purpose which is to act as a channel from the inner to the outer.

 I am not saying that religions cannot learn from one another nor that they may not have the same inner truth behind them, but to seek to combine their outer trappings and forms of worship robs them of their operative value and results in a maybe well-intentioned but effectively confused mish-mash, style without substance. The mystical elements of the various religions may be reaching for the same inner truths but you cannot mix and match the externals, and to see a picture of Christ sitting like Siva seems blasphemous to me. I understand that Father Bede himself was aware of the dangers of syncretism, and I mean no disrespect to his person in writing of my impression of his ashram like this. He was born in a time when religions were very exclusive and it is understandable that as a mystic he sought to move beyond that, but I think the approach tried at his ashram was a mistaken one even if it was well meaning and sincere. '

My visit to Father Bede's ashram was nearly forty years ago and it may be completely different today, but that's not the issue. My point here is that the 'all religions are one' attitude, popular during the 20th century, doesn't really work. Because there is nothing hidden anymore and we appear to have easy access to everything that has ever existed, it is tempting to blend traditions and think we are getting the best of all worlds. But greater breadth often means less depth. I do think we can learn from other traditions, and one of the advantages of living at the present time is that we have that possibility. But if you blend the outer forms of traditions that have sprung from totally different revelations you will lose the connection they both might have had to the source of all.

When I visited Father Bede I was more persuaded of the idea that all religions express the same truth than I am now. Today, we can see that God is conceived very differently in some religions compared to others, and the desired heavenly destination is not the same in all cases either. Obviously, there are strong similarities and the mystics of every religion do have much in common, but we live in a world which is increasingly dominated by spiritual evil and it seems clear to me that only Christ has the power to stand up to that evil. I wonder that if Father Bede were still alive whether he might reassess the wisdom of blending Hindu and Christian iconography at his ashram.

Repost 1: A Holiday in India

 I noticed the other day that there have been 1,000 posts on this blog since it started. This seems a good moment to repost one or two from the beginning, slightly re-edited to reflect my present thinking. My spiritual intuitions are largely unchanged but the form they take has developed through the writing of the blog which is one of the reasons for doing it.

There is a chapter in Meeting the Masters, the book about the early part of my spiritual journey, that recounts a trip to India Michael Lord and I made shortly before going to live there on a more permanent basis. This was in 1979 while we were living in Bath and I was just beginning to find my spiritual feet. It was the Masters' wish that we went to India though they did not tell us that until after we had decided to go. This is a basic rule of the spiritual life. You are not told directly what to do. You may be impressed by the higher powers but you must respond to impression and make your decisions for yourself.

In the book I mentioned that Michael had taken a few photographs during the trip, and I would have liked to have included some of them in the book but production costs made that impossible. However, a blog has no production costs so I can add them here.

Michael's camera in 1979 was a pretty basic one, even for the period, so the pictures are not of a high quality. Also, though he took around 20 photos over the month we were there, not many have made it though the intervening 45 years. It's not like today when people take hundreds of photos and, as far as I can tell, rarely look at any of them again.

We started our trip in Delhi where we visited the Red Fort, the Jama Masjid and other tourist sites but the first photograph I still have was taken at the Victoria Memorial in Calcutta, one of those  grand buildings the British put up in the Indo-Saracenic style which mixes Mughal and Gothic revival architectural features. It's now a museum.

As you can see, I was not a particularly willing subject. There is a definite 'get on with it' expression on my face.

While in Calcutta we stayed at the Ramakrishna guesthouse and visited the Swami who had initiated Michael into that order a few years previously. He was a venerable old gentleman but still fully fit and demonstrating the inner calm that the Masters were frequently telling me to acquire but which I lacked then and don't have as much as I should do now. Inner calm may be easier to maintain in a monastery or ashram than in the hurly-burly of the world but, as a mental attitude, it should be unaffected by outer circumstances, whatever these might be. This is because it is not a question of controlling emotion but of being centred in the real and therefore responding to the external world as just that, external. A criticism that could be levelled at the Asian mentality which may find it easier to attain inner calm is that it does this by disassociating itself from the reality of the external world so one has to be careful that detachment does not come at the price of the rejection of the subsidiary but genuine reality of outer things and conditions. Spirit is primary but matter is real in its way too.

After Calcutta we went to Darjeeling and then Varanasi but no photos remain from those visits. They were mostly just standard tourist photos of the Himalayas and the Ganges so no great loss though I do regret the absence of a group photo of the Buddhist monks who were staying in the same lodgings as us in Varanasi, with some of whom I enjoyed a game of football. There was no problem in getting them to smile for the camera, something I have always found difficult. Other lost photos are of the Ghoom monastery near Darjeeling which apparently is now called Yiga Choeling, and of the very ancient-looking monk with skin like cracked parchment we spoke to there. This monastery is known for its 15 feet statue of the Maitreya Buddha (that's the Buddha who is to come) of which Michael took a now lost photo. Here's a substitute which is probably of better quality anyway.

While flying to Delhi en route to Kashmir something unpleasant got into Michael. I had been warned of the possibility of this by the Masters, and told that my conduct was the key as to whether it happened or not. In this case, having the puritanism of the spiritual neophyte back then, I had argued with him over what I perceived as worldly behaviour. He had reacted with anger, and the resultant 'bad vibrations' had given the entrée to some kind of demon which had possessed him. I didn't realise what was going on at the time but was profoundly shocked by the transformation. He hissed at me and then shouted, oblivious to anyone who happened to be nearby. His eyes became a dull reddish colour and his skin turned sallow. He was totally uncompromising and hard, quite unlike his normal self. This lasted for the entire flight to Delhi and the thing was only ousted when Michael fell asleep while we were waiting for our ongoing flight to Srinagar. He remembered nothing when he awoke. The Masters told me afterwards what had happened and said that they permitted it as a means of showing me externally what my own lack of control looked like. An extreme policy but I have to admit it was effective. Demonic possession may not be accepted nowadays by the general populace but it remains a possibility, especially for those of a mediumistic tendency which Michael obviously was. Similar experiences were noted in the case of William Coote, the medium in The Boy and the Brothers book.

Michael was well protected by those he served and this sort of thing happened on only a very few occasions and when it did it was always initiated by a spiritual lapse on my part. That is why the Masters permitted it. They told me they could always banish the demon but it might take a while. I don't pretend to understand the mechanics of it but can simply pass on what I was told and what seemed to be confirmed by observation.

Kashmir was a good place for healing and rest. We stayed on a houseboat on the lake called Nagin Bagh and for a week did little more than read, walk, swim and laze in the sun. Here's a picture of the boat,

and here's a not very good picture of Michael in a shikara, the narrow rowing boat that ferries people around on the Kashmiri lakes.

The Masters came frequently while we were in Kashmir, and it was there that they explained what had occurred at Varanasi airport. They told me that there was no need for fear but I should remain vigilant which sums up how the spiritual aspirant should respond to the problem of evil. When I first wrote this piece I was conscious that the word evil might offend because there was this naive idea among some spiritual seekers that evil is just ignorance and in the higher worlds everything is goodness and love. Unfortunately, that is just not true. Evil exists in the spiritual world. In fact, that is where it comes from. I think that nowadays this has become much better understood, especially as it is becoming harder to deny the presence and activity of evil in the world. It always has been understood in serious religion but post-'60s New Age-type spirituality thought it knew better. It didn't.

From Kashmir we returned to Delhi and then on to Agra. North India is a confluence of Hindu and Muslim culture, and the latter reached its apogee in the Mughal Empire which by any criteria must be one of the most splendid ever to have existed. By the criterion of architectural excellence its only rival would be the cathedrals of medieval Europe, and this excellence comes to a peak at Agra. Naturally, Michael took a picture of the Taj Mahal which is undoubtedly a miracle of art and design but I preferred the Tomb of Akbar at Sikandra, and here is the photo I mention in the book as the only one in I which I smiled.

Sometimes you feel a connection with a place. When I visited the tomb of the emperor Akbar I felt like a little piece of a jigsaw puzzle that slotted into place. It fitted. That's the only way I can describe it and it is why I am smiling in the photo. Oddly enough, when I went back to the site 3 years later it was just an impressive building. The spirit seemed to have gone, but that first time was remarkable.

The Cassandra Syndrome

 I don't know how many readers have experienced this phenomenon but I find these days if I speak to anyone, even in watered-down tones, about the parlous state of the world, the country, the culture and the human soul, eyes roll and I'm told I'm talking nonsense. I have only one acquaintance in the real world who would go along with any of that. Most people simply cannot accept that the Western world in the 21st century stands on the edge of a precipice. Perhaps I just don't know the right people.

Cassandra, as I am sure you know, was a Trojan princess who was cursed by the god Apollo because she turned him down after he had given her the gift of prophecy in exchange for sexual favours. Her fate thereafter was that everything she prophesied would be true but no-one would believe her. This has echoes of Mark 6:4 when Jesus said that a prophet is not without honour except in his own country and among his own kin and in his own house. I am no prophet but the spiritual state of the world is so bad that anyone who has the slightest awareness of reality ought to be able to see it. The remarkable thing is most don't and I am tempted to say they won't either. They refuse to do so because they are too firmly ensconced in their own comfortable pseudo-reality. They will go along with the clearly biased and fictitious mainstream narrative as we saw in the events of 2020 and again more recently, and get quite angry if holes in this are presented to them. They will talk about science when it appears to back them up but utterly reject it when it does not.

Why is this?  One reason is that most people are still cushioned by comfort and relative wealth. They don't want their boat to be rocked. As long as the trains run on time, so to speak, they will believe everything is fine not realising that when an electric fan is turned off the blades continue to revolve for a while but more and more slowly until they stop. The time to be concerned is when the current is cut not when the blades stop by which time it may be too late.

Then we live in a culture which has become heavily feminised and such a culture no longer has truth as a priority. It is replaced by a relativistic attitude in which there is no higher or lower but everybody has to be accepted on their own terms because we're all equal. That way we all get along, supposedly. In such a nursery world truth can seem hard and ugly, threatening even, and so you ignore it but truth is what is and what is cannot be denied. If you do you will only bring greater suffering on yourself in the long term. The Trojans ignored Cassandra when she warned them about the Horse left behind by the Greeks. They brought it inside their gates and its foreign occupants destroyed them, a parallel which should give us pause for thought today. 

And then most people now have zero awareness of the spiritual reality of things. Religion has been destroyed in the UK, and the tried and tested traditional wisdom of the past has been sidelined for fashionable dogma. The takeover of the country's institutions, political, legal, educational, the media, by the forces of atheism and materialism is now complete. Some commentators speculate that these institutions have been the victims of deliberate sabotage as a result of Communist infiltration, and the process has been so insidious and so comprehensive that does to be seem the only reasonable explanation. However, even if this is what has happened we need to recognise that the agents carrying out the scheme in this world are the servants not the masters which doesn't make them any better, but we should know the ultimate source of the evil and that is supernatural.

How have they got away with this? One answer is suggested by Yeats in his prophetic poem The Second Coming when he sums up the situation in a couple of lines that have become well-known. "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." Evil hates good and that gives it its passionate intensity but most people's connection to the good is too feeble to make them fight for it, and this is doubly so when they have been indoctrinated to believe that fighting is morally wrong in itself because to fight is to hate. And so we are left with the strange situation in which actual hatred disguises itself as love and condemns supposed hatred, in reality love of the good, in order to delegitimise any opposition to itself.

But we have to fight for truth when it is under assault. Given the climate in which we currently live I should stress I mean fight with words and that even words must be chosen with care. Having said that, listen to what Jesus has to say in John 8:44 about the Pharisees of whom there are still a great many around today. 

"You are from your father the devil, and you choose to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies." 

Isn't this hate speech, to use a modern term? Maybe, but it comes from the Apostle of Love which should make us think. The fact is there is evil. It has a spiritual source and it has to be recognised for what it is and fought with all our strength.

The Trojans refused to listen to Cassandra because she disturbed them. They would rather close their minds to truth than accept reality because reality challenged their comfortable illusions. Most prophets bring bad news - that, after all, is their function, to call an erring community back to God or the gods. But Cassandra was right and if the Trojans had listened to her they might have avoided their utter destruction.