Monday 5 August 2019

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.

3 comments:

Francis Berger said...

You have given us a lot to contemplate here, William. Thank you. And enjoy your break!

Bruce Charlton said...

"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."

Yes, true. And/ But in the short term, this may lead to great results - for the thing invested-in. Artists or scientists may pour all their hopes and energeies into their subject. It is not sustainable, but it can lead to remarakle results for a while. I think we can see this with many geniuses of recent generations, who begin and are raised as Christians (or Jews) but abandon faith in their adolescence or young adult life, and put everything into their work - there are many examples - perhaps most recent geniuses have this pattern.

ted said...

"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."

Brilliant! Yes, according to the secular left: we are all one and the same in the world, but with many pagan gods and goddesses.