Discrimination

Is discrimination a good thing or a bad thing? Increasingly these days it seems to be stigmatised as the latter but surely there is a big difference between an emotional reaction and a rational judgment, which is what discrimination actually is. For the one is centred purely on personal feelings while the other is both reasonable and objective, being based on evidence and dispassionate observation. For example, it is clearly wrong to discriminate between one person and another merely on racial grounds, but it is certainly not wrong to recognize that one culture may be superior to another in that it explores more deeply the reality of what a human being is or has a more developed understanding of what goodness and virtue really mean. Its philosophy may be wiser, its art more beautiful and its religion more spiritually profound.

Discrimination has to do with quality, and determining what has the greater and what the lesser quality. This requires an absolute standard, or the recognition that there is such a thing, and the understanding that reality is not merely relative. But we live in a quantitative age when everything is supposed to be equal with nothing better and nothing worse except, of course, if that premise itself is disagreed with which is automatically worse than agreeing with it.

In traditional Indian philosophy, discrimination or viveka is one of the main virtues to be acquired by the aspiring spiritual disciple. Principally it entails the ability to discern between the real and the unreal but, by extension, that becomes the ability to distinguish the higher from the lower. It is an essential virtue in a world of form in which one must learn to penetrate behind outer appearance, but it is also necessary in order to discern which forms reflect reality and which forms obscure it. We might say that Christianity is a form that reflects reality while leftism is a form that obscures it, and we need discrimination to see this. Without it how can we really know anything?

Lack of discrimination means lack of judgment. It opens the door to a steady reduction of quality because if everything is worth the same then nothing is really worth anything. Cliché but true. No discrimination closes the door to the  appreciation that there is a greater or higher to which we should aspire, and a lower which we should avoid if we are to develop in the way we should. But we know this. Unfortunately we've been duped into thinking that oneness is the highest condition and everything else must be sacrificed to gain that. But the only real oneness is the unified ground of the prima materia when everything is reduced to nothing. Spiritual oneness, on the other hand, is hierarchical because everything descends from God and aspires, when rightly ordered, to climb towards him.

The reason God created was to introduce the glories of many-ness into the state of oneness. In a world that had not fallen this would be apparent. Everything would be valued for itself but it would still be recognised that there are degrees of closeness to God, and some beings who reflected more of him than others. But we live in a fallen world and that means that there is another factor at work. Some beings have fallen away from God and their works reflect that. It needs discrimination to sort this out and to orientate ourselves to the good.

The Esoteric and the Spiritual

Which is more important and why? Some thoughts on that question here.

What is a spiritual person?

If you were a spiritual person you wouldn't criticise or judge anyone. You would love everyone at all times. You would be tolerant and accepting of differences. For spirituality must not give way to judgment or discrimination. Love is all and must be offered equally to everyone regardless. This is what one is sometimes told.

But is it really so? Look at the prophets and at Jesus himself. They condemned the falsehood of this world. They knew that a spiritual person had to set himself against this world and the (false) values of the world. They said loud and clear that there was a better and a worse, a right and a wrong, truth and lies. They did not pretend all was well for the sake of being friendly and kind when it was clear that evil prevailed. They made a choice and took a stand and so must we.  The so-called spiritual person who goes along with the world for fear of being thought unloving is a dupe and spiritually feeble. This world and God's truth are always at odds.  You cannot serve two masters. You cannot serve God and this world.

So yes, a spiritual person must love and yes, a spiritual person should certainly accept, and even rejoice in, the broad panoply of human differences as all part and parcel of God’s creation and all worthwhile in their own way. But more than this he must love God which means love truth and not accept that which is counter to God or truth. He should recognise the reality of a hierarchical structure to the universe and therefore see that there is better and worse, and he should also see that this is a fallen world in which we are in the midst of a spiritual war. You don't win a war by refusing to fight your enemy. Turn the other cheek does not mean capitulate to evil. It means don't react in your heart with hatred towards your enemy but at the same time don't pretend that wrong is right for if you do then wrong will surely triumph.

A spiritual person has to balance truth and love in his or her heart. Sometimes one must be to the fore and sometimes another. It all depends on circumstances and the need of the moment. There is no outer response which is right at all times regardless. Jesus preached to the masses and was silent before Pilate. He forgave sinners but overturned the money changers' tables at the Temple. He responded according to the situation and each situation was different but because his will was entirely ordered towards God he had no need to think about what he was doing and no need to subject his behaviour to any kind of rule or censorship. For him spontaneity was truth. He could act with love when that was required and from the perspective of unbending truth when that was. That is a spiritual person.

Albion Set Apart

For those who believe in God everything in the world is a sign pointing to him and to the way he works. It’s a fallen world so not everything is a perfect sign but still we can read symbolic significance into nature and its parts. The four elements obviously have symbolic value and are a clue to something beyond themselves, and the same is true for the sun and the moon, the wind, the sea, the eagle, the lion and so much else. Creation is a book which when you learn how to read it points straight at its Creator and gives you an insight into his mind.

Continued on Albion Awakening.

Opinions

In the present intellectual climate everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion and everyone's opinion is more or less equally valid. But, in fact, it is always assumed that your opinion must be within the parameters of secular humanism to be considered acceptable.

I have a different view. Yes, of course everyone is entitled to their opinion since God gave us free will and we are allowed to exercise it. However to think all opinions are equally valid is nonsense. Clearly those opinions that are founded on a greater knowledge of reality than those that are not are worth more. Equally clearly those opinions which come from disinterested motive and pure hearts are worth more than those which arise from self interested motive which many opinions do though this is not always acknowledged. For instance, the demand for the expression of full personal freedom lies behind many opinions. As does the denial of God which is often based on the pride of the denier.

So no, not all opinions can be considered equal. Some approximate to truth which exists objectively and some just correspond to a personal prejudice. As always we need to examine the heart and motivation of the person proffering an opinion before we decide whether his opinion is worth anything.

Mysticism, Monism,Theism

Many mystics who prioritise experience, and perhaps an intellectual approach, over revealed truth, tend to assume impersonal monism is a higher or deeper realisation than theism, dismissing the latter as dualistic (bad word) or, if they are influenced by Indian religion which many are, a bhakti approach, bhakti being something like devotion to a deity. So they equate theistic mysticism with an emotional dualistic, me and him, attitude to God, one still centered in the self which must be transcended for full realisation. 

From where I stand they are both right and wrong. Yes, full identification with the separate self must eventually be left behind and yes, an emotional loving response to God does take place on the level of that self, albeit a purified level. But bhakti as devotion is different to agape which is love as being-feeling not emotion-feeling (hence without an opposite and not subject to fluctuations), and a higher state than simple identification with pure consciousness which is a kind of ‘back to where we started’ state that disregards the purpose of incarnation and experience in our dualistic world with the consequent sense of separation between self and other. It also isolates one part of our being, namely spirit or essential being, from the rest, in particular soul (individuality) but body too, thereby reducing the totality of what we are to its most fundamental aspect. 

But the true goal of unfolding life is the integration of spirit and matter, of the individual and the universal, including not separating, making the two one but, at the same time, keeping them as two and so preserving the truth in duality even if seeing it in the light of overall oneness.  Monism rejects matter by seeing it just as a veil on spirit and with no purpose or function in itself.  It has sometimes occurred to me that you could even regard it as metaphysically misogynistic, if you wished to think in those terms, matter being an aspect of mater and also maya, the feminine side of divinity, and crucial to God's purpose for us.

A proper theism sees the one and the many as not just both valuable but both essential with truth in both, and it seeks to preserve their uniqueness while uniting them in consciousness. And while monism ultimately seeks experience and therefore, contradictorily, could be perceived as self-centred, theism is concerned with doing the will of God in love and humility. 

Which is greater, to reject the self or to sanctify it? To exclude or to include the fruits of creation? I would say that the latter is not just better but truer to God's intention for us.  Why otherwise create us?

Sometimes disagreements are just over words and, bearing that in mind, you could say that the real goal is to reach a state which combines monism with theism since both contain something of the truth and neither is sufficient on its own, especially if your understanding of theism implies an unbridgeable separation between God and Man. There is no separation. Life is one. But within this oneness there is multiplicity and it is that which gives love, beauty and goodness to life. Monism is wrong because the personhood of God belongs to the highest level of being, and there is an element of differentiation right at the heart of existence. That is the Trinity which contains within itself the principle of differentiation and so makes creation possible. But theism is also wrong when it sees the creature as always apart from the Creator. For truly creature and Creator are one in essential being just as they are different in expression.

The highest truth is not in pure being alone but in being and becoming together always working together to create more, a ceaseless expansion of life to the greater glory of God and ourselves, his children.

The Absolute and the Infinite

I'm not a particular enthusiast for the writings of Frithjof Schuon but one observation of his I do find interesting is his remark that, metaphysically speaking, the masculine can be equated to the absolute and the feminine to the infinite. In my previous post on the spiritual risks of feminism I talked about how the cosmic principle of the masculine preceded that of the feminine in ontological terms and, by extension, in their expression as man and woman even though the two are complementary. This seems to me to be the instinctive perception of most people before they are troubled by ideological concerns but it is actually quite hard for the mind to get a hold of because it is not equality and it is not fully complementary either. There is complementarity but there is also a sort of hierarchy. This is brought out in the story of Adam and Eve, and perhaps a good parallel from the natural world would be the sun and the moon but still it is something that would be largely resisted today.

But if we think of masculine and feminine as linked to concepts of absolute and infinite then we can see that the absolute is ontologically prior to the infinite because the absolute is being itself while the infinite relates to becoming or to the absolute in expression. Think of the absolute as a point and the infinite as the rays that stream from that point when it manifests itself and you will see that the one does precede the other even if in terms of creation both are essential.

Likewise with the transcendent and the immanent. These are two aspects of one whole but God is transcendent before he is immanent just as he is absolute before he is infinite. You can say that transcendent and immanent only make sense as a pair but still one must come first just as the Creator comes before the creation. Esoterically the mystery of sex is supposed to be fully revealed only in the higher initiations and one can see that there is a deep mystery here which is why it causes us so much trouble to resolve.