Calling Things by their True Names

We live in a world of lies. Anyone who tries to break free of that will be attacked and the attempt made to depict that person as mad, bad or stupid. I know this might sound rather an extreme statement, maybe even bordering on paranoia, but it is really just a simple observation of how falsehood seeks to protect itself. On some level those who represent falsehood, who maintain and promote it, know that what they are doing is contrary to reality. When truth appears, it threatens them and must be destroyed. Specifically, the reputation of the person who speaks it must be destroyed. Of course, Jesus was actually killed but anyone who tries to follow in his footsteps will face opprobrium when they run up against the falseness of this world and are forced to pick a side. 

For the more one breaks free of the worldly illusion (fundamentally the denial of God because of a wish to be God oneself), the more one will be attacked. As my teachers told me "the greater progress you make, the more you will be assailed by evil in all its forms." This manifests itself both inwardly as attempts to make you succumb to various forms of sin, pride, anger, fear, self-righteousness or whatever, and outwardly in the form of attacks by others who are not usually conscious of what they do but nevertheless can be used because of their own deficiencies and failings.

You cannot adapt a spiritual world view to a non-spiritual one. If you try to compromise with the default non-spiritual position of the present time, which embraces most of the apparent advances that have been made in recent decades (in the form they are understood at least), you will either end up betraying yourself and falling back into the non-spiritual or else being made to look hypocritical and foolish. You really have to start from a completely different position, one that does not take any of the standard liberal nostrums, panaceas and assumptions as necessarily and indisputably true. If you try to include these as part of your spiritual understanding, they will just take over and the spiritual will become secondary. If they have any truth in them that will be included in a higher form in the spiritual position. But taken on their own terms they just deny the spiritual or, at best, relegate it to a dependent role which effectively denies it anyway.

We live at a time when there is an all out assault on truth through science, through politics, through art, through various social movements and even through forms of spirituality that subtly and not so subtly distort the real. This is why it is important to speak the truth from the highest point one can and not to compromise. Compromise means failure. It means that that with which you compromise will first colour and then consume your spiritual position. At the same time, don't over-react to the lies by rejecting the elements of truth within them. They must have such or else they would not have become so attractive to so many. But see these elements from the higher standpoint and you will find that very often the secondary has been made primary and the primary ignored. For instance, loving your neighbour comes after loving God and is dependent on that. Unless you exercise discrimination with regard to this teaching it means (theoretically) that you will direct equal love to Satan as to Christ. An extreme example undoubtedly but one that is intended to bring out the absurdity of taking this teaching out its proper context and misapplying it or else applying it to all and sundry equally.

When you read the Gospels you find that Jesus did not mince his words. He spoke truth and it was frequently unwelcome. In this he echoed the earlier prophets who were often persecuted by their communities. He was direct and he did not compromise in what he said to make it more palatable to his audience. He was able to do this because he was operating from the position of complete truth. Although we do not have the absolute direct vision that Jesus did, those who can see the primacy of God can still speak from that knowledge and should do so. Sometimes discretion is the better part of valour but this discretion must be for reasons of prudence not fear. In general, the time has come to call things by their true names and not worry about the consequences.

Mock Christianity

Does Christianity relate principally to this world or the next? Does love mean loving everything equally and without discrimination? Or does it depend on right vision and a true sense and scale of values? See here on Albion Awakening for some reflections on this prompted by a sermon at the recent royal wedding.

The Difference between Psychic and Spiritual

Now and then in the course of the writings on this blog I use the words psychic and spiritual to differentiate between two states of being and knowing, stressing that the former is often mistaken for the latter, particularly by ex-materialists unfamiliar with religion, but the two should not be confused since they relate to quite separate realities. One might be said to be human, all too human, while the other, spiritual, is only known when an individual goes beyond the normal human condition.

The geography of the universe can be considered horizontally as is customary, but also vertically. It is useful, and quite probably accurate, to conceive of the totality of existence in terms of levels with the physical world understood as the lowest level, that in which matter is most material and consciousness most restricted. Though these very characteristics enable the development of mind which has to work to express itself and, through working, grows.

The world, then, has vertical as well as horizontal extension. If the lowest level is the most material we may understand the highest to be spiritual, and in this case the psychic level is midway between the two. I must emphasise that this scenario is grossly simplified but it has at least a symbolic accuracy and carries with it implications of a hierarchy of being which informs us that life is a unity in which there is an ordered diversity.

The psychic plane is higher than the physical (higher meaning freer and more expansive) and relates to it as the mind does to the body. But still it is the plane of subjectivity, being comprised of our thoughts, feelings, desires, beliefs and experiences, both individual and collective. This gives us the clue that it is largely a creation of the created. Spirit and matter are divine realities but the psychic plane is the product of human and non-human thinking and imagining. (Non-human as it contains entities that are of a different order to ourselves, entities known in folklore and myth). It is both formed of and contains the psychic impressions and experiences of all created life. This does not mean it is illusionary because these impressions may be grounded in created reality, but it is still a subjective world in which truth can only be seen through filters, the filters of our own limited consciousness. If we are operating in it, we interpret reality, we do not see it directly. Our understanding and perception is refracted through our mind and will always have a personal tint. You might say it is still sensually based which is why the psychic plane is regarded as a phenomenal world, phenomenal in this instance meaning a non-spiritual reality in which externals still dominate for remember that form-based thoughts are external to the soul.

If the psychic world is subjective, the spiritual world can be seen as purely objective. What this means is that our awareness of it is direct and untouched by personal factors. We see it as it is so person A sees and comprehends the one self-same reality as person B. This means that anyone who wishes to see spiritually must, to a large extent, transcend the limitations of their personality. Not deny their individual self but remove the psychic blinkers, attachments, desires, fears, conditionings, prejudices, both individual and collective, and so on that belong to the personal self. Spirit transcends sensory experience as it does individual thought. The world of spirit is that of first principles which are not mere abstractions but living realities fresh from the mind of God. If we would know these, truly know them not just theories about them, we must conform ourselves to them, and that means purify ourselves of the stain of sin which clouds our minds and darkens our hearts. Sin is always the mark of separation from objective truth.

The psychic world is a world of personal experience, even if that experience is of supernatural things. The world of spirit is that of objective reality. In the psychic world we are still functioning in the world of creation. The world of spirit is that of God himself.

If all this sounds bit abstract I have some good news. Jesus Christ is the embodiment of spirit as he is of truth, and deep contemplation on his person will provide an insight into spirit. Just make sure it is the real Christ you meditate on not a concocted figure by which I mean one of your own or of collective imagining which would be a psychic thing. If you need to ask me how to tell the difference I must say I can't tell you. That is something you must discover for yourself from intuition. But if your heart is true and your aspiration pure that will not be too hard.

God Save the Queen?

As the British monarchy becomes more and more like a branch of show business, here are my thoughts on whether the present queen has done a good job.

http://albionawakening.blogspot.co.uk/2018/05/god-save-queen.html

Sophistry of the Left

I have come to the conclusion, obvious really when you think about it, that all leftist argument and debate is essentially just sophistry. It is wishful thinking, prejudice, resentment, envy, rebellion against truth, emphasising the lesser at the expense of the greater, ignoring overall reality for the sake of details, dressed up in intellectual garb but its substance is hollow.

Truth is truth and to the uncorrupted heart shines out with clarity. That is why the ignorant and the wise often have more common ground with each other than either do with the learned but unwise or, to put it another way, the products of the modern education system. You may wish for truth to be other than it is but wishing and denying won't make it so. And if you do so wish, that is because of a corruption within yourself because truth is good and anything that goes against truth is bad. Moreover, truth is joy so you are throwing away true happiness for the short term satisfaction of some personal goal.

Of course, the leftist position is not all wrong. It would not attract so many were that so. But is essentially wrong because it denies reality and it denies God except for when it allows him but that is always on the basis of him having to fit in with its agenda. For the left God, if he is permitted at all, has to be seen in the light of Man instead of the other way around.

When I speak like this people say, but what about the right? Aren't they just all for themselves and for preserving the status quo of the rich and powerful? As far as I am concerned this is just defining the right in the terms of the left, as in what the left sees itself as opposing, or, if this is what the right is, it is only what it is when it has abandoned God and taken on many of the ideas of the left. Left and right are actually leftist terms anyway and only came about after the initial rebellion against natural order. I have no interest in left or right in that sense, the sense of purely political ideologies. The real division is between spiritual and anti-spiritual, and, though it is true that these two can also tip over into political attitudes, that is only when the spiritual is not properly understood, usually when it is seen as an extension of the natural rather than that from which the natural takes its rise and to which the natural should submit.

It's time we stopped thinking in terms of left and right and saw the world only in terms of the light of God. There might still be debate about truth and justice and goodness but if we saw these as emanating from above downwards rather than operating predominantly on the human level then we would recognise the natural hierarchy of being which in no way excludes essential unity. The two go together and both must be taken into account but they must be seen correctly, each in its own sphere, and neither should be allowed to trespass in the sphere of the other.

We resort to sophistry when we are more more concerned with an agenda than with truth. We then obfuscate and deceive and change our terms of argument and redefine language and misrepresent our opponent, all tricks that leftist ideologues use to advance their cause. But truth is simple. Think of the words of Jesus. Concise, clear and without any attempt to use force. The left is all about force, forcing their way through the manipulation of thought and word. The left is largely built on lies.

The Best of Times, the Worst of Times

A post on Albion Awakening about which of these is a more accurate description of the present time. Or are both true in their different ways?

http://albionawakening.blogspot.co.uk/2018/05/the-best-of-times-worst-of-times.html

How Do You Know?

This is a question I have been asked many times. The reply below is an expanded version of what I usually say.

Q. How do you know what you say is right and not just the product of your imagination?

A. That is a reasonable question but I would point to several factors which confirm the truth of what is written here though these tend more to the general than the particular. For instance, I have no doubt that basic reality is spiritual, that Jesus Christ is the prime exemplar of that reality, that there is meaning and purpose to life, that demonic activity takes place which seeks to destroy that purpose, that we are living during a period roughly corresponding to the Biblical end times and so on. But a matter like reincarnation, in which I also believe as the means consciousness evolves, is of lesser importance.

So what are these factors? First of all, I have to put my experience with the Masters as detailed in the book shown on the right. Obviously this is a personal thing but I would hope that most people who read the book feel that it has, at least, a certain plausibility and maybe even the ring of truth. These Masters were spiritual beings who spoke with the knowledge of having transcended the limitations of this world and the human form. They had realised their oneness with God. When they spoke they did so from direct experience of a sort that went beyond the need for subjective interpretation. I would like to think that something of that comes through in the book even though it has to do so through a very imperfect medium - me!

Secondly, there is scripture and revelation. Either one believes these things or one doesn't but I cannot see how anyone reading the Bible, specifically the Gospels, can fail to detect that here is the description of something real and, more than that, something holy in the sense of carrying a truth not of this world. Particularly insofar as the figure of Jesus is concerned. The sheer quality of his teaching and the profound beauty of his person leave no room for doubt to a mind that is not too corrupted by this world. Across 2,000 years Jesus is more vividly real than any other person, alive or dead.

Connected to scripture there is tradition. Tradition is the residue of humanity's best understanding about life. Just as the best works of art survive down the ages (generally) and the second rate is weeded out, so humanity's best ideas survive the rigorous examination of time and become tradition, tried, tested and found true. And tradition speaks with one voice of the reality of the spiritual world. Details differ but the fundamental reality of God is confirmed by tradition. It is only the present age, blinded by its own narrow focus, that doesn't see this.

This leads to the next factor, in some respects the most important of all because it is the most personal and the one that goes the deepest. It is intuition. Now clearly that is a vague word which can be used to cover many different things from emotional responses to wishful thinking to half-formed impressions etc. But proper intuitive insight is not a vague thing at all. It is direct knowledge and is a faculty of the mind that begins to develop as you start to go beyond your limited self and align yourself with reality. To be sure, much is called intuition that is not this. It generally comes from people who have begun to be aware of  the intuitive faculty but have not yet developed it enough to be able to discern what comes from their own self and what comes from a deeper level. However that does not alter the fact that real intuitive insight does exist and it is the voice of God within us, just as, in a different way, conscience is too. Intuition is, quite simply, seeing with the mind. Not thinking or feeling but seeing.

Connected to intuition are two other things which I should mention. One available to us all, the other not. The first is common sense. Common sense has been under attack over the last century or so because the increasing intellectual polarisation of humanity has tended to focus the mind on the plane of theory and abstract thought. This can help us to understand what we know but it can also get in the way of real knowing which is replaced by knowledge. We lose connection to common sense and get caught up in ideas which may or may not be based in reality. Common sense tells us that this world is not all there is to life.

The second thing connected to intuition is impression. I was told by my teachers, and I believe this because I have occasionally been conscious of it, that they sought to guide me through impressing thoughts on my mind at a higher spiritual level which I would then have to bring down to the mental level. Thoughts in this connection does not just mean ideas in the conventional sense of that word but living spiritual realities as in the thoughts of God are real things. The truths impressed would need to be interpreted by my brain because they are not given in verbal form, but the main thing required is to interfere with the thought as little as possible. Not to put too much of oneself into it, though it would necessarily have to be expressed in the mental language of the person concerned.

A final confirmation that the points made here about the spiritual world are grounded in reality and not just wild speculation or fantasy on my part is what you might call the signs of the times. It's becoming increasingly apparent that the world today corresponds to descriptions given in Christian, Hindu and other scriptures about the end of an age when connection to spiritual truth is lost and human beings see themselves as existing only in material terms with all the concomitant illusions, misconceptions and overturning of the natural order that brings. The spiritual pole of essence is overshadowed by the material pole of substance. Normally there should be a balance between the two with the latter being seen in terms of the former, but at the end of an age this true state is reversed as substance increasingly dominates essence. Who could deny that this is the current state of affairs? It results in many upheavals as traditional understandings and hierarchies are overturned and new ones are established, based on the false perception of matter being the determining reality. For some it is liberating to be freed from the constraints of the past, but others see this as tragic since it separates us from all that is good and true as well as all that is highest and best in ourselves.

For it should be borne in mind that the constraint of the natural has as its purpose the eventual blossoming of the spiritual. Obviously when these constraints are lifted (the sexual revolution being a prime example), and all attention is focused on the physical plane, there is a great initial sense of freedom. The destruction of traditional forms releases an energy which is very exciting to begin with but this is soon dissipated and the inevitable hangover follows the binge. And then you have nothing left. You're like the profligate young man who blows his inheritance in riotous living and ends up in poverty. This is happening to us for we have squandered our spiritual inheritance and, as a result, we do now live in great spiritual poverty, all the worse for being largely unrecognised. All this was predicted, and these predictions support the thesis of those who say that we must turn to a proper spiritual understanding both of the world and of ourselves if we would find a way out of our impasse. There really is nowhere else to go.

These are the things on which I base the writings here but ultimately the question posed above is of secondary importance. What really matters is whether what is said here calls forth a response in you, the reader. If it does, that can only mean that, on some level, you already know it.