I'm A Spiritual Person

Doesn't it make your toes curl slightly to hear someone say this?  I read it in a magazine recently, as spoken by an actress, and wanted to reply, no, you're not. You just have a vague idea of how wonderful it would be if everything was love and bliss and peace and we were all nice to each other as though we lived in a yoga retreat on a tropical island. You think materialism is crude and competitive, and you disapprove of argument and violence. We should all love each other and the world would be a better place.

I exaggerate to make a point but you get my drift. To call yourself a spiritual person is intended to show that you care and are not greedy but someone who is concerned for others and the environment because everything is one.  You are a good person, someone who sees beyond the selfishness of ordinary mortals. But what is this so-called spirituality? Does it include the fear of God which is the beginning of wisdom or does it see that as an insult to love? Does your spirituality mean you recognise yourself to be a fallen soul in need of salvation or do you see the mere acceptance of the idea of the spiritual enough to make you a spiritual person?

It's not what you believe that makes you spiritual. In fact, the only really spiritual people are the saints and they would never call themselves spiritual. They know that they of themselves are nothing and any good in them comes from God. This is the opposite attitude to the modern "spiritual person" who is happy to dub him or herself thus simply because he or she believes in some kind of undefined spiritual something or other beyond this world. You might think I am being over-critical here but I am trying to expose the falseness of much modern-day spirituality which wants to have its worldly cake but with a spiritual icing on top. If you do not reject the world you are not a spiritual person, and if you really are a spiritual person you would not dream of describing yourself as such because what you are effectively doing is saying I don't need God, I can do it on my own. My spirituality comes from me. This is the opposite to the truth.

I'm sure a lot of this comes down to naivety and ignorance because we have virtually no proper spiritual education these days and the field is wide open to charlatans with books to sell. Nevertheless it is important to make clear that what the world needs now is not spirituality but proper spirituality which is spirituality grounded in a proper understanding of God. Unfocused spirituality can be exploited in just the same way good intentions can be. Remind me where they lead.

What Is the Devil Most Seeking to Destroy?

I think it is the natural order of being. If this were still intact our spiritual loss would not be so grave and would be relatively easily recoverable. But once it is undermined, as now, anything goes. When we are separated from our own human nature and regard said separation as progress then we are indeed lost souls heading for destruction in one way or another.

The devil has sought to dismantle hierarchy which is the basis upon which the universe is built, the greater having its place in the scheme of things and the lesser having its own, maybe not equally important, but still vital place. This hierarchical destruction includes the erosion of spiritual authority, the attack on the natural order with regard to male and female, old and young, intellectual and instinctual, the destruction of the sense of transcendence, the relativisation of values of higher and lower, more and less evolved and so on.  All done in the name of equality which is a false concept, existing only at the level of absolute oneness which is an abstract level of pure theory. Creation itself depends on an initial inequality and imbalance for without that nothing could be, the nature of being requiring separation and difference which means that things must be particular things. The search for equality is ultimately a search to return cosmic order to primeval chaos.

Hierarchy can be abused, become inflexible and corrupted. All levels have their rights and their duties, both of which can be ignored or forgotten. But a properly functioning hierarchy is essential for a properly functioning civilisation with its roots in heaven and potential for growth in this world. Spiritual hierarchy sees all men as brothers but knows there are older and younger brothers who all live under one Father God and one Mother Nature. This union of spirit and matter produces souls, and souls all have individuality. Individuality is the opposite of equality which exists only in the ant hill and, actually, not even there.

The devil is far advanced along his path of the destruction of the natural order of being. This time he has acted not by overt force as in the two World Wars but by persuading a softened-up humanity (softened up by the rejection of God and an intelligence uncoupled from wisdom) that moral goodness means recognising everyone as equal, whatever they are, because we are all human beings. But this denies the soul for it is the soul that gives quality to life. We who live in a quantitative age, in which the transcendent is denied and the material seen as all there is, matter being the principle of quantity, are unable to perceive quality, not proper quality at any rate. Therefore we are ripe for the picking. And picked we will be unless we start to wake up and no longer allow ourselves to be led astray by ideas that might sound reasonable on the surface but deny the deeper parts of our nature.

When God is denied spiritual truth, which is basically truth itself, is lost. God doesn't force himself on us if we don't want him so he might be said to be at his weakest at this time. However, when the devil is denied he can be at his strongest because we take no precautions against him and easily fall into his traps which are just as effective against the clever as against the foolish. In fact, they are more effective against the clever, who are never as clever as they think they are, if they are not inoculated against error by some kind of genuine religious understanding. The foolish at least have instinct. The foolish would never think a man was a woman or that it's a sin to love your own sort above others. 

We need to protect ourselves against the devil, both individually and collectively. Collectively requires religion which is now more or less moribund in most parts of the world and, where it exists, so undermined by political attitudes that its spiritual power is minimal. But we can protect ourselves individually and since this is a time when we are called upon to make the search for God within ourselves and our own minds (which does not negate the communal aspect but that is not longer sufficient if we are to take the next step), I will focus on that.

It's actually quite simple. The most important things are prayer and humility, as has always been known. But right up there with those two, especially today, is discrimination. The ability to judge. To judge between real good and real evil, not surface-level good and evil. To judge between the truth and lies, and to see the latter plainly, however cunningly it has been dressed up to look attractive. If this is too vague and abstract for you then I would say take Christ as your yardstick, and the whole of Christ not selected bits. 

Nowadays we emphasise Christ the merciful but he was judgemental too, sometimes very much so, and if you don't believe that go back to your Bible. He was judgemental because he knew that we try to sneak into heaven carrying our sins with us but that simply won't work. Sins are like heavy spiritual weights that will drag us down. So Christ was judgemental precisely because he was merciful. True mercy does not pander to darkness just so as not to have to be unpleasant. The devil knows how to use mercy to advance his agenda which is why it always has to be balanced with judgement or discrimination. The opposite is the case too, of course.

Creativity

Creativity or art can be seen as man engaged in one of his highest divine functions. He is acting according to the image of the Creator planted within him and fulfilling his office as God's vice-regent or representative inside the creation. 

But there are rules.  When man creates he should do so as an expression of his own unique individual nature thus bringing something into the world no other being can. At the same time, he should not create purely as an individual. This is the major and spiritually disastrous mistake of so much art and science and invention of the 20th century and beyond. Creating from the self as opposed to through the self is where it has all gone wrong. The true creator creates in accordance with God's laws, though since the word law implies a certain rigidity and lack of freedom, patterns would be a better word. But these are the laws of creation, the parameters that God set up at the beginning, and to go against them is to go against the order of creation and thus God himself. If we do this we are not so much creating as anti-creating, being creatively destructive as it has been described.

In fact to go against them is also to go against our own being since these laws are the template according to which we are made.  Thus it is no coincidence that it is only when human beings abandoned belief in a transcendent reality that they started to create outside of and actually against nature.

And what was the effect of this? It certainly wasn't any real happiness or fulfilment. To begin with there was a sense of liberation, the rush of energy you get when a container is shattered and its contents released. But then the energy is dissipated and there is nothing left.  The feeling of emptiness results and that is what we currently live with and what we try to fill with novelty (the 'news') and distraction. But this never works and like all drugs we need more and more to achieve less and less. All this from abandoning reality and seeing ourselves as self-created which is what materialism really amounts to for if we have no creator we are responsible to no one.

Art to achieve its proper function must be moral. Of course, you can have art without morality but it always, however good, and most is not, falls short. But what is morality? It might be defined in several ways according to one's beliefs about the nature of reality. For the Aztecs even human sacrifice may have been seen as moral. But there are clearly true and false beliefs, those based on truth and those based on illusion. Fundamental to real morality, however, is the acknowledgment of God and the recognition of cosmic good and evil. I use that adjective to differentiate between what is good in a spiritual sense and what is good materially. Today we see material good used to justify spiritual evil and it deceives many. The current obsession with climate change, for example, uses a legitimate though probably overstated concern to advance an agenda of totalitarian control and substitutes faith in God with repositioning ourselves as God. Let me explain what I mean by that.  Being responsible stewards of creation under God is right and proper and what we are called to be. Being the ultimate arbiters of creation as the climate change lobby imagines we can be is blasphemous. As I said in my previous post we are meant to be gardeners of the planet but under God who is the head gardener.

So real morality involves two things. The recognition of God and the understanding that he has set up an order of being in creation with its own proper rules. To go with these is morality. To go against them is immoral. You might just as well say good and evil. This order of being is not an inflexible system with no give or room for creative expression but it does have laws, some of which, like justice and mercy for example, cannot be obeyed slavishly or in a bureaucratic rule-following way for they complement each other and so have to be interpreted on a spiritual level by the discerning mind that has adapted itself to truth through striving to love the Creator.

This brings us back to art and creativity and the fact that to be an artist of a kind is one of our primary roles. But we need to create according to the rules and patterns of creation and the natural order of being. If we don't, we are following Satan not God and that is what humanity in the mass is currently doing.

Environmentalism

What a long and unsympathetic sounding word for something that should be very simple, namely a love of nature centred on the understanding that it is the creation of a Creator. The environment? Is that a word that conjures up in your mind birds, trees, plants, flowers, animals, fish? Does it speak of mountains, rivers, valleys, hills, fields and hedgerows? Are the wind or the sky or the sea or the desert the environment? Of course, in one sense they are but the point is that something real, life-giving, even alive in a way, and beautiful is often reduced to an object of science, and not just in the minds of professional scientists who analyse and dissect either. It is so too for activists (another terrible word speaking of aggressive ideology) who are supposed to be fighting (again, note the word) for its preservation.

There was a time when people who spoke out against the destruction of what we now call the environment did so from love of nature and a strong awareness of its beauty. Often, on some level at least even if that was only because they came from a world in which a divine reality had long been accepted, they were conscious that it was a gift, a garden to be tended, and though we were workers in the garden we were not the head gardener. Now the situation seems to have changed. Now, many people who would call themselves environmentalists don't believe in God and don't see nature as a creation. Sometimes their approach is purely pragmatic which is to say they want to preserve nature so that human beings can continue to exploit it only more sustainably, the utilitarian attitude. But sometimes much of their motivation seems to come not from love of God but a kind of hatred of mankind and this hatred they can best express by attacking mankind for what it is doing to the environment. They want human beings to take a hit because they don't like human beings or certain sectors of humanity anyway who are perceived as rich and powerful. Not because they love nature. Granted this is a simplification because motives are often mixed, but it is clearly a factor and sometimes a major one.

In the spiritual world (which is the real world) motivation is all-important. Why you do what you do matters much more than what you do though, clearly, the two are interlinked. And fundamentally the only good motivation to do anything is love of God. In the final analysis, what is not inspired by this is not well motivated. Trying to preserve nature or make a 'sustainable environment' if you do not know what (or who) created this is still all part of the rebellion against God. It is part of evil. When all is said and done, good can only flow from love of God. There is no good, none whatsoever, without God.

I have loved the natural world all my life. To begin with, just for itself but even then I felt there was this aspect of a veil to it and that behind it there was something more real and truer, the response to which is where this love came from. I never learnt how to drive a car, partly because of the noise and stink they made, partly because I suspect I am not really someone who can focus on mechanical things (this is not meant as a badge of honour, I see it as a defect), but very largely because I hated what roads had done to the countryside and the town. To nature. Don't get me wrong. I like roads as in tracks and paths that lead to new places and join separated people. But I hate them as metalled scars that deface the environment (appropriate use I would say) and don't blend in to their surroundings. And that take far too many vehicles on them which travel far too fast.

So I would regard myself as a lover of nature, as is any sane and normally constituted person, though now I see it as a creation. Which doesn't lessen it in itself. To see a saint as a person through whom God works doesn't lessen the individuality of that saint. It actually augments it and so it is with regard to nature as creation. 

I love nature but I don't like the environmental lobby who often, not all but many and the most vociferous, use nature to advance a political agenda or an ideology that, when looked at clearly, denies God. If you deny the Creator of nature your understanding and appreciation of the natural world is much diminished, whatever wonders you may claim to find in it. And you are not on the side of the angels, not the good ones anyway.

Passing Thoughts

I shall be taking a break from this blog for a couple of weeks so I thought I would jot down a few brief thoughts which I might have developed into full posts in time but which probably say just as much (or as little) as they are here.

• Truth comes before love which is why repentance is necessary for forgiveness.

• Even God can't save those who don't want to be saved.

• We all seek happiness but what part of us is seeking happiness? The fallen self with its shallow desires and selfish greed for worldly pleasure or the soul with its connection to deeper realities and truths? Do we seek for our happiness in creation or in God? 

• God or religion is not there to make you happy in your fallen self which is the false self but to help you step out of that aspect of your being into your true self.

• What is the great sin of modernity? It is to seek personal autonomy and fulfilment rather than to coordinate your being to the reality of the Creator. Ironically enough, only by turning to God can we really find the freedom we desire because he is the source of our being and the reality of what we truly are.

• The teachings of Christ without Christ himself do not work because reality is personal not abstract so he is his teachings and they are him.

• Christianity has been corrupted in modern times because its central doctrine of love has been separated from the teachings about sin and the need for repentance. The two have been prised apart and the distortions of leftism are the result. Christianity itself is not at fault here. It's more that modern men and women refuse to pay the price of real goodness and want its rewards without making the sacrifices required.

• A materialist is someone who thinks that object preceded subject. 

• Those who would stand for the true good which is the truth of Christ must stand against the false good which is the truth of this world. And, strange as it might at first sight seem, the true good divides while the false good unites. It divides truth from falsehood, greater truth from lesser truth, beauty from ugliness, good from evil and higher good from lower good. The false good unites all things in the name of a higher truth. But this means that evil is effectively denied and the material is put on the same footing as the spiritual.

• The modern world applies truths that relate to the pure spiritual world of oneness to the material world of duality and multiplicity where they do not apply. 

• Buddhism and similar philosophies are powerless against the attacks on the world by evil because they use essential oneness to deny proper reality in creation.

• Are we male and female in heaven? The Masters were all definitely male except one who was definitely female. To those who say that spirit transcends sex I would reply that no doubt it does, but we are not just spirit. We are a triplicate of spirit, soul and body and cannot be restricted to the most fundamental aspect alone. As long as we are a being, we are a particular kind of being.

• When you deny God you seek for the absolute elsewhere but in things that can never deliver. But until you realise that you become obsessive about the thing in which you have invested your desire for the absolute. Hence the fanaticism of political revolutionaries, utopian idealists and many atheistic artists.

• For Westerners today Buddhism, despite its profundities, is something of a spiritual dead end. At best it can be a psychological preparation for giving up the ego in a Christian context. This is because the real spiritual goal is not to renounce the reality in creation, which encompasses beauty, goodness and love, and retreat into the oneness of pure unmanifest spirit, but to unite the worlds of becoming and being in full consciousness, bringing matter, purified and exalted, up into spirit. Marriage is better than celibacy.

I'll be back posting towards the end of August.

Are You Prepared to Die?

I was recently present at a conversation in which someone asked if old people were ever happy to die or if they would cling onto life regardless, even when they were ill and in pain. The general view was that, whatever their physical and mental condition, most people would try to live for as long as they could. There are certainly some who do seek to die because of long-term sickness and extreme pain or incapacity but, by and large, the old people today hold on to life for as long as possible even when they are unable to enjoy much about it. This, it was agreed, is because of the natural human desire for self-preservation, and is universal.

I disagreed. I thought that the fact, if true, simply showed the lack of belief in God and the absolute refusal of modern men and women to think in terms of an afterlife. We are indoctrinated to believe this to be wishful thinking and so we reject it as fantasy. I said that the reluctance to face and accept death is the mark of a person completely out of harmony with reality, someone who has cut himself off from not only the spiritual but the natural too. For, even if the spiritual is ignored, we should accept natural cycles and know that there is a time to let go and depart this life. For myself, I said, I would not be concerned about death once I felt I had done what I was supposed to do and fulfilled my obligations. I would be nervous because it is a tremendous step into the unknown and I do believe in some kind of post-mortem judgement when your earthly life has to be accounted for, but I would not be frightened nor would I try to resist it or prolong life beyond its natural point.

Death is the summation of life and should be completely accepted. If you submit to God's will in this matter and resign yourself to his keeping in humility then whatever you may or may not have done in your life you will be all right. The creature is returning to the Creator and that is a tremendous thing to be faced with a sense of awe but also wonder and excitement. It is only the person who rejects his Creator who need fear death.