More on Buddhism and Christianity

Some comments on recent posts have defended Buddhism against my criticisms of it which, it should be noted, are criticisms only from what I regard as the higher viewpoint of Christianity. I have the greatest respect for Buddhism and for the Buddha himself whose achievement was unparalleled in the purely human sense. But Christ brought, indeed he was, a direct revelation from God which goes beyond anything purely human.

My comments regarding Buddhism are made from the position that what the Buddha taught and what Christ offers are two different things, even though there are substantial overlaps, and that this should be understood at a time when many people believe all religions say essentially the same thing. Buddhism teaches the truth beyond the self, which the Buddha didn't actually deny but which he saw as an impediment to spiritual realisation. For Christ, though, it is the self that is the ultimate means of reaching the state of union with God, a union that can be made more and more complete and ever fuller as that self develops in holiness. For the Buddhist, the self must be overcome completely but for the Christian it is sanctified though that does require its overcoming as a self-centred or phenomenal thing. 

The different attitudes to suffering bring out this distinction. The Buddhist seeks to escape suffering. That was the original motivation of Gautama, and a suffering Buddha makes no sense. He would be an unenlightened Buddha which is a contradiction in terms. The very definition of a Buddha is that he has gone beyond suffering. But Christ suffered, and for a Christian suffering can be redemptive not merely a result of past karma as in Buddhism. And this shows us the difference between Christian love and Buddhist compassion. Love is fully personal but compassion is universal, not really directed at one thing more than anything else and therefore, in a sense, impersonal. Because of this personal quality love, even spiritual love, is vulnerable. It does not dwell on a lofty plane far removed from everyday reality. It is deeply involved in reality to the extent that it can fully feel the pain of reality.

Here are some questions I would put to a Buddhist. Do you accept that consciousness evolves? Or that life is purposeful? Do you have an explanation for creation? And if Buddhism maintains that we exist in relationship, that, as it puts it, all is interdependence, what is relating?

It seems to me that a person who becomes a Buddhist must suppress something within himself in order to do so properly. Note that Buddhism is essentially a monastic religion. What is suppressed is love in the personal sense and if love is not personal, what is it? As we saw, this is tied up with suffering. In the Christian story, Jesus suffered. Even God suffers and that is because of love. In Buddhism suffering is what we need to escape from, what we need to free ourselves from. I know that in Mahayana Buddhism there is the figure of the Bodhisattva who renounces Nirvana until all sentient beings are released but this is somewhat at odds with traditional Buddhist teaching and possibly came about because of the tendency to nihilism that contains within itself. I am not saying it is nihilistic but it can seem so. And the fact remains that if the individual is not real, if the person is not real, then love cannot exist. If the person is real then God must be personal too as the greater cannot come from the lesser. Later Buddhism tried to incorporate the virtues and values of the personal but had to be logically inconsistent with itself and its core teaching in order to do so.

Buddhism is unsurpassed in its insights and its development of 'skilful means' to overcome the ego and dis-identify with the phenomenal self. However, despite the later statement that samsara (becoming) is not different to nirvana (being), it cannot incorporate the full reality of creation into its vision of life. To say samsara and nirvana are one really means it's all nirvana but actually diminishes the importance of the contribution and purpose of creation which is to bring about a higher development in which reality becomes a relationship of multiple individuals united in love. This entails the marriage of created reality and uncreated being and brings about something new and more than the latter (the nirvana state) on its own. Ultimately, the Buddhist rejection of God (and he is rejected because he is not fully accepted) turns out to be not its trump card as often seen by modern people, but its Achilles heel. Reality is not impersonal oneness but fully and gloriously and eternally personal. And this is what Christianity teaches us more than any other spiritual approach.

Added note: I am sure there is an aspect of reality which is impersonal oneness but this is not the preferred option desired by God for his creation or the reason for that creation in the first place.

An Experience of Demons

I apologise for touching on such an unpleasant subject, but I recently experienced what I feel was very probably a psychic attack and reflecting on it afterwards has given me a clue into what damnation might involve. The attack took place in the form of a dream, though it was like a waking dream in which you are neither completely asleep nor completely awake, and consisted of a pair of incidents in which a sort of mind disintegration appeared to be attempted. I'm not saying that could have really happened in this case but it did give me an insight into what might be a permanent state if a particular course is followed to its bitter conclusion.

Damnation is loss of the soul. Loss of the soul must mean loss of the self and a self is lost when it is disintegrated into existential chaos. The demons' work is destruction, the returning of cosmic order to the black pool of nothingness. This may be what damnation is. There are many forces in the modern world that aid and abet this disintegration, preparing the ground one might say, and some of them are happily pursued by foolish people because they give a kind of false ecstasy as the moorings of the mind are loosened and a horrible freedom is offered, freedom from the boundaries of order. In music we have rap, electronic dance or rave music, heavy metal and punk. These all dissolve structure into chaos in a more or less brutal fashion in which the rational mind is aggressively broken down to a sub-human instinctual maelstrom. The examples of modern art and literature follow a slightly different, possibly more cerebral, course but to the same end. Order into chaos. This can potentially be valid if a new and higher order is formed from the chaos but that is a rare, very rare, thing, and is certainly not the goal of the examples I have cited. These are all to do with a sort of celebration of chaos. When you break boundaries there is an initial ecstasy as the freed energy flows out but it is soon dissipated and you have nothing left.

My experience was as follows. My next-door neighbour had a party in his garden. Only about 10 people but the houses share a wall and it might just as well have been in our garden. There was loud talking, music playing and raucous laughter. This neighbour is frequently noisy until late. The main group broke up around midnight so I thought I could go to bed but had to open the window because it was so hot. There were a few people left, talking and music still going. I put in ear plugs but could still hear them.

At around 1.15 I had had enough so stuck my head out of the window and asked them to go inside, none too politely I admit though I wasn't rude. They said they were talking about something important and it was none of my business. I should just shut my window. I said it was my business if they kept me awake and that I found their behaviour unbelievable. Besides, I could hear them even if the window was shut which would also make the room like an oven. Then I gave up and went back to bed. They carried on for another 20 minutes and finally left. 

I suppose I got to sleep around 2. Then I had this very vivid dream. I dreamt they had come back again but this time with some other people and were making a lot of noise. I tried to put my head out of the window but it had been covered up with some material so I couldn't. Eventually I got the material off and put my head out to ask them to be quiet. As is the way in dreams the scene had changed slightly. The garden had moved a bit but the main thing was the people were now skeletons that glowed a lurid green colour. They mocked me and made more noise. Then they began attacking me psychically by which I mean they projected evil at me, some of which was expressed as this same lurid green in the form of 'dark light'. I can't describe it better than that, I'm afraid. The psychic attack grew stronger so I prayed to Jesus for protection. But when I tried to banish them in the name of Jesus Christ I couldn't say the words 'Jesus Christ'. It was as though my brain had been drenched in a kind of treacle which blocked it. Eventually, though, I succeeded and I found myself back in bed with them apparently gone.

But that wasn't the end of the dream/experience. While lying in bed I felt someone or something come in through the window with, of all things, (don't ask me to explain!) a supermarket trolley. This creature went through the room and downstairs where my two children sleep. I got up and followed it and found it outside their room with its trolley. I could clearly sense the aura of naked evil. It wasn't just bad. It was evil in a very pure way, dispassionate but absolute. Again, I tried to banish it using the name of Jesus and again, I couldn't get the words out. The thing began attacking me, not physically but on a spiritual level which I have known before and is very different as you feel as though something is trying to disintegrate your mind which will not function properly. Finally, I managed to call on the Masters, the teachers I describe in my book, and this thing was driven away. I knew I couldn't have dealt with it on my own. Then I woke up.

Now, a conventional psychologist would say that I had been disturbed by the neighbours and my mind made up this scenario as a result. I'm sure that had something to do with it but I am also convinced that is not all there is to it. I think the initial disturbed state created a kind of entry through which evil beings could attack. I am well aware most people would dismiss this as preposterous or else as evidence of mental derangement, even paranoia, but there was a very clear difference between this dream and the normal run of the mill sort, few of which I ever remember. This was more intense and vivid by several orders of magnitude. I was not particularly frightened because even in the dream world I find I can trust in God, but it was pretty terrifying purely as an objective experience. 

Assuming this was a psychic attack, and, as I say, I have experienced similar things before though not often or to quite the same degree, I have to ask what its purpose might have been and what it can teach us. The purpose can perhaps be summed up by some words of the Masters who told me that the greater progress you make the more you will be assailed by evil in all its forms. This is because every person who breaks free of evil by turning to God represents a nail in the coffin of evil, a step towards its eventual destruction. 

But why was it allowed? I don't wish to self-dramatise and I have a suspicion that one is not supposed to talk very much about personal inner experiences, but maybe one of the reasons this happened to me is that I have this blog and can share such experiences so that if anyone reading encounters something similar they might know what to do. And what to do is very simple and very traditional. Call on Jesus Christ. You might find, as I did, that something tries to stop you doing this. In my dream my brain turned to mush but I called in my heart as well as my head and I was answered. I also realised my utter dependence on God. In your waking existence you can pretend this is not so but in the vulnerable sleep state where you are exposed to the psychic plane the room for self-deception and self-aggrandisement is very much reduced. Everything is more raw and open.

I reflected on the 'things' that attacked me and I came to the conclusion that they were more like things than beings with individual consciousness. The being in the second episode particularly just seemed to be a kind of embodied malevolence. After first appearing as a dark shadow, it took the form of an old friend of mine but the eyes were pools of dead malice. I believe that demons are lost souls that have had their individual selves hollowed out and have become vessels for evil in a ghastly parody of saints who can be vessels for God. The saint has offered himself in love to God and God fills him with himself. The lost soul has by his thoughts and behaviour given himself to the devil but instead of being filled by goodness and truth is taken over and used. It's as if the devil literally consumes them and then operates through them though he can only do so to the extent of their personal attainments of power, intelligence and such like. It's horrible to think of and I apologise for putting this thought out there but it may be a reality of the spiritual universe of which we should be aware.

As I was writing this I sudden realised that's exactly what the Nazgul were in The Lord of the Rings. As usual, Tolkien's spiritual instincts are pointing in the right direction. Then the figure of Weston occurred to me as described in C.S. Lewis' Perelandra where we are shown a human soul that has been taken over by the devil and entirely lost its humanity. Weston has become a 'thing'. His soul has been disintegrated and its life energies taken over by Satan.

There are many forces in the world today that are seeking to prepare us for spiritual dissolution, a dissolution that may well happen to those who have been sufficiently 'softened up' in this life after they depart this life. I have spoken of certain forms of music and art. Drugs are another obvious example but there are also ideologies that seek to reduce everything to a uniform oneness. Shun these like, for they are of, the devil. Focus on the Good, the Beautiful and the True which are necessarily hierarchical and separative, two words which have been given a bad connotation today but simply mean not everything is equal which it could not be for absolute equality can only exist in nothingness. Always aspire upwards. Do not deny or dismiss the lesser for it too is of God but know that things are closer to or further away from him. They are not all at the same distance even though he dwells in all things.

Evil is running riot all over the world today but we should not pay it too much attention. The manifestation of good conquers evil more effectively than actively fighting it. We should certainly be wise to evil but the more we focus on the good, the more we can help bring that out. I have written this piece because of an experience a couple of nights ago but I would like to end it by praising God who is the author of all good and who waits to welcome us into his kingdom if we will accept the invitation.

What Will It Take to Wake Us Up?

So far this year we have been sent to our rooms like naughty children and have obediently complied. Then we have been told that our country is not ours anymore and expected to accept that on pain of being regarded as hateful extremists. This on top of the already existing demands that we acknowledge men to be women and women men if that's what they want. Our history which, though not without black spots, is largely the history of humanity's greatest successes, has been traduced and vilified.  And we are not yet halfway through the year. What could be next?

I'll tell you what. The Christian religion will be completely reframed. Already it has been hollowed out and its proper spiritual function reduced to a secondary concern. Soon it will be made completely secular, a system of belief whose sole function is to promote equality among the people of the world. An anti-sexist, anti-racist arm of the mainstream political ideology with which it will agree in all important respects. Christ will become what he often is already, a social worker of 'good will' whose teaching was only about humanity as it is in this world. The rest was just an unfortunate consequence of his living in an antiquated superstitious society. The religious aspect of Christianity will not be directly denied but it will be reduced to almost complete insignificance. 

Real Christians will have to leave their churches. I realise this is not a nice thing to say and might even make some people think of me as some kind of devilish tempter so let me be clear. I am not saying this because I think people should leave their churches. I am saying it because the churches have left Christ so if you want to follow Christ you will need to follow him directly. I know people will say this church may have done that but mine hasn't and I am not so foolish as to think that the spiritual apostasy has affected everywhere equally. But it is everywhere and getting worse. "My kingdom is not of this world". If you want to enter Christ's kingdom you will soon, if you have not done so already, have to look beyond this world.

But this is a decision for each individual and I make the point only to offer assistance to those who already feel like that but have a sense of guilt or fear. Do not worry. If you love Christ then you may assume it is him guiding you on this path. He still loves his churches but if those churches no longer serve him in the way they should then he will, as he promised, speak to us directly through the Holy Spirit. Now is the time when that Spirit is starting to speak more openly to more people, even if it is still relatively few. Many will miss the communal aspect of the churches but the real spiritual work is always done on a solitary level and an individual basis. We are saved one by one and today that is truer than ever. We have to take the spiritual bull by the horns and rely on ourselves. All institutions and that includes religious ones will now let us down at best and may corrupt us if we follow them in the way they have themselves become corrupted.

I do not wish the churches to disappear. After all, they have preserved Christianity for centuries. Through them millions of souls have come to God. But they have fallen far from their proper place and it may be that they have to retract dramatically so they can be purged of their secular accretions and become real islands of sanctity again. Be that as it may,  they are certainly not what they were and they will fall still further as described above under relentless attack from both outside and within. Those serious about seeking God will have to look beyond the churches now.

Freedom

If the current protests have anything real at their foundation (and are not just the product of virtue signalling and mob frenzy) it would be the idea of freedom which makes it ironic that most people involved in them are slaves. Slaves of anger or ideology or prejudice or fear or hatred or resentment or a sense of entitlement and sometimes all of these. What is more, the protesters seek to enforce through their  intellectual bigotry a slavery every bit as pernicious as physical slavery by denying freedom of thought to those who disagree with them.

Freedom is what defines a human being. Nothing else that we know of in the world is free, but a human being is. That does not mean we are totally free. We are conditioned and determined by many things, hereditary things, environmental things, our biology, our experiences and so on. Nonetheless, at the core of our being there is a freedom that is recognised by all sensible people, known instinctively to be there at a level beyond the purely phenomenal one. This is the basis of our individuality. It is what makes us who we are. It potentially makes us free of nature or matter which are determined things and offers us a way into the true and unlimited creative freedom of the spirit.

Where does this freedom come from? It cannot come from matter because everything material is conditioned by what it is made of. It's a product of other things which define it. There is no freedom in matter. No one really knows what goes on at the sub-atomic level  but it is not freedom. So our freedom must be non-material or spiritual which means it comes from God or else it is innate in spirit itself. Spirit is freedom before it is even being which is another way of saying that it is "I" not "it", personal not impersonal.

The personal nature of God or spirit (I don't really differentiate except that you could say the one is transcendent and the other immanent) has important implications for what this world is for. It is a place in which we may exercise our freedom. That is why it is a place in which suffering and evil exist. Our life is a series of choices leading up to the all-important choice of God or not God. If we choose God we choose the creative freedom of spirit, light, love and truth. If we choose not God we choose matter. Effectively, we choose prison and darkness but so that the choice may really be free these can be seen by the mind rebelling against God as freedom and light. However, it is freedom for the ego which is the product of the spiritual self identifying with matter. This unrepentant ego then goes to what we can call hell but hell is only seen as hell by the soul that has chosen God and spiritual freedom. To the soul that goes there it may well be just a place of experience like any other. The eternal privation would only be felt as such, to the fullest degree anyway, by the soul that has given itself back to God in love. For the soul that has denied God, the loss of God is not so keenly felt even though it will certainly be known on some level.

It may be that, spiritually speaking, freedom is more fundamental even than love because love is only possible as a result of freedom. It is also the case that the freer you are, the more you love but this refers to true spiritual freedom not mere self-will. The devil has self-will but he lost his real freedom when he rejected God. Complete freedom is only possible in God because God is the father of freedom. It is what he is.

I said that suffering and evil come about because of freedom which raises the question as to how we may overcome the one but keep the other. The only way is through Christ. That wonderful statement in the Book of Common Prayer that 'in his service is perfect freedom' sums up the truth that material bondage can only be broken when we freely align ourselves with the spiritual reality of Christ. At the moment, we have freedom but we are still largely bound. In Christ that limited freedom becomes full and complete. At the beginning we were one with God but not consciously so. Through being born in a place in which the ability to exercise freedom is possible, a place of duality where inside and outside are fully separate, we can consciously choose God but this choice is not just an intellectual thing. It must be a redirection of our whole being from material to spiritual. This is why the path back to God is a hard one. It requires complete reorientation of the will.

Freedom is why God made both us and the world. It is what lies behind creativity and gives the universe its dynamic quality. Correctly used, it is our passport to becoming a god but at the moment many of us are giving it up by surrendering to evil, the very reverse of what should be. We must break the chains of material bondage and claim our freedom in the world of spirit. 

A Reflection on the Present Time

I have been following a spiritual way of life for 42 years now. That sounds rather grand but all I really mean by it is that I accepted the reality of God 42 years ago and have tried to live according to that reality since then. I am painfully conscious of the many ways in which I have fallen short of my aspirations and ambitions, and I understand more than ever now how we are only saved from the sin of egotism and selfishness by the grace of God. We are totally dependent on that. Without it we cannot escape from this world which we carry with us all the time because we are part of it and it, in a very real way, is part of us. But if we genuinely do turn ourselves over to the love and mercy of God then we are saved. I remember reading some time ago a quote from the prophet Isaiah, "All our righteousness is as filthy rags". I was struck by the power of this statement and I recognise its truth more and more. That doesn't mean that we should not try to be righteous (a lovely word, by the way) but we should do it for the love of God not trying to use it as some kind of passport to heaven because it never can be.

All this is a preliminary to what follows. In around 1990 my spiritual teachers told me that we were currently living during a period of greater vulgarity than at any time in the history of our planet. I believe they knew that history and therefore could speak with authority. What on earth would they say now? Most people of my acquaintance genuinely think that things are better than ever today. Only recently I was told that this is the best time to live despite its problems, and this is not just because of greater material ease due to the advantages of a modern technological society. We are kinder, more tolerant and more equal and this makes us better than our forefathers. I don't doubt we are better in some ways but the fact is we are a spirit-denying society and this makes everything about us evil. Yes, I use that word. Not mistaken or in error but evil. Evil is the rejection of God. Certainly it can have more dramatic manifestations as in violence and cruelty but those are just particular sorts of evil. The heart that is closed to God lives as a material being (even if it has some spiritual goals) and this makes it open to all kinds of spiritual (as opposed to material) evil. The behaviour of a material being does get increasingly vulgar (to use the Master's word) because, losing touch with higher reality, it becomes increasingly debased, focused on its material self and the pleasures of that self. Material pleasure is not wrong but it should never be seen as primary let alone all there is. It must always be known in the light of our reality as spiritual beings.

Once you abandon God, you abandon reality. That is what we have done. It explains why the natural way is rejected now and anything that happens to exist in any form is regarded as equally valid as anything else that happens to exist. When the spiritual order, the vertical hierarchy of being, is denied, the horizontal or natural order cannot stand since it has its roots in the spiritual. Now we have no roots. We are blown about in any direction dictated by the worldly powers because there is nothing else against which we can measure truth. We are like corks drifting around on the ocean. Past generations may have lost their spiritual understanding but they still had the worldview built by that understanding and it was the determining part of their experience of what life was. But this worldview has been chipped away at and gradually demolished over the past few decades and the speed of demolition has increased dramatically since the turn of the millennium, coincidentally or not. I feel the solar eclipse in August 1999 marked a definite shift from a time when the old world still had some authoritative power to one in which new ways became completely in the ascendant. They are now the norm.

The only thing we have that is wholly our own is our will, our capacity to make a free choice. This is the part of us that is actually independent of God. That is why what we decide to believe is of critical importance. From the acceptance or rejection of God (and agnosticism is still a kind of rejection) comes everything else. Clearly, it must be a proper acceptance. It must be God we accept not some kind of idea we might have about him, and it must be an acceptance of the heart not just the mind as appears to be the case with so many of the current church leaders whose understanding of God is filtered through a basic worldliness. The present time is the result of a mass turning away of the human will that now seeks its own independent fulfilment rather than fulfilment in God which is the only true fulfilment. The modern world may have been inspired by forces of spiritual evil but it has been chosen by us. We cannot claim innocence. We may have been manipulated and deceived but nothing obliged us to succumb to that. It was a free choice on our part and we will have to live with the consequences of that choice.

Today we are faced with a false good and a true good. The false good is the good of this world. It is political good, humanitarian good. Any good without God. It is the good of the human race considered primarily as human beings and without reference, or with just token reference, to their Creator who is also their properly destined end. It is not just a matter of a different kind of good but of a false good which is actually evil because it redirects spiritual qualities such as love and intelligence into material channels, seeking material good. But it is even worse than that. It is not just spiritually neutral but anti-spiritual. The 20th century was largely spiritually neutral, for the majority of people anyway. The 21st has become anti-spiritual because even the forces that pretend to material good are, as we see now, motivated by hatred and the desire for destruction. We live in a time when evil runs rampant disguised as good. I do not think we can escape this, and even to try to stand against it outwardly, thinking that the tide can somehow be turned, is a mistake. We should always proclaim our opposition to it but not in the hope that this will have any effect other than for those relatively few individuals who look for light in a world of increasing darkness. These are the end times and our hope must be in God and he never fails those who place their hope in him.

Pulling Down History

If a nation starts to rewrite its history it ceases to be itself and becomes something else. Recognising past mistakes is right and proper and part of a maturing process but outright rejection of the national story to fit in with a single issue extremist political ideology is an attack on a nation's soul, in no way to be reconciled with the existence of a free people.

I was recently present at a conversation about the current drive to take down statues of people associated with what are now regarded as unsavoury episodes in our country's history even though, in most cases, the statues are not there to celebrate those episodes but to commemorate other aspects of the lives of the individuals concerned. The argument raged back and forth but I did not contribute partly because in normal life no one takes much notice of statues anyway! But I do understand the symbolic significance. Then one of the participants suggested that, rather than take statues down, we should put up new statues of non-British people who, he thought, represented humanity at its best. Somewhat inevitably he put forward Gandhi and Nelson Mandela for their peaceful non-violent protests. I couldn't resist pointing out that Mandela had a past record of violent terrorism which, if you are going to ignore, why not also ignore the problems with those who are currently under attack? I added that in any Empire other than the British it is probable that Gandhi would have 'disappeared'. It is only because of the innately civilised qualities of the people he was peacefully protesting against that he could get away with peacefully protesting, though this is not to deny the justice of his cause. Besides, even Gandhi is criticised for racism now though, ironically, his words, as reported in this article, have recently been attributed to Churchill and given as a reason for defacing his statue.

But this was not my main objection to the idea. If you erect statues of people who were not central to your country's identification of itself as a nation and give them the same footing as those who contributed to the idea of the country as a special place with its own identity and role in the world, you risk losing integrity as a nation, losing the authentic sense of self. This is even more the case if these people were actual opponents of your country. It is fine to respect such people for their virtues but to celebrate them means you diminish yourself. Is that the point of statues? What is more, the two individuals proposed did not transcend representing their own group so what is their purpose here? They did not fight for humanity. They were Indian and South African respectively, and they were fundamentally political figures, thereby increasing potential divisiveness. The only possible justification for a statue of a non-national (other than a person who contributed to the national story) would be for someone who really did exalt humanity as a whole and I'm not sure I can think of anyone like that except Jesus Christ. I suppose you could add people like Plato and Mozart but really what would be the point except perhaps in an academic or artistic institution? And now I think of it, didn't Plato live in a society in which slavery existed? And Mozart is often today deemed a racist (see Monostatos in The Magic Flute) so he's out. I only thought of the potential problems with these two after I had chosen them at random which shows how complicated the selective reframing of history is.

There is something very symbolic about pulling down beyond the obvious act of destruction. Pulling down is levelling to the ground, returning something created back to the state of non-creation, raw matter. It is significant that this is the only state in which complete equality can exist. The drive to establish equality is supposed to be the rationale behind all political action on the left now. But complete equality must mean the levelling of everything down to nothing. Things are only equal when they are all nothing, all completely flattened, any individual quality crushed. As Nicolai Berdyaev says in his 1923 book, The Philosophy of Inequality, "Inequality is the basis of cosmic order. Absolute equality would have left being in an unrevealed condition. The demand for a forced levelling, which comes out of the lower levels of chaotic darkness, is an attempt to destroy the hierarchic cosmic order which was formed by the creative birth of light in darkness, an attempt to destroy human personality itself."

The destruction of the past is what all tyrants seek so there is no other framework of understanding than the one they wish to impose. Once our history is rewritten we will no longer be the same people. Maybe this is the future and part of the dissolution to be expected at the end of an age, but if we wish to remain spiritually free and not become the conditioned slaves of an ideology we must at least understand the process for what it is and not succumb to it inwardly.

None of this alters the fact that there has been past injustice and unfair discrimination and the consequences of these still exist today. This cannot be denied. On the other hand, I don't think there have been many occasions when a completely different group of people has been introduced into a society in large numbers and the result has not been bloodshed. There have been wounds and there needs to be healing but the only possible way forward requires forgiveness and respect on both sides and part of that respect is that the historical integrity of the nation must be honoured, warts and all.

Note: This essay might appear to be written from the point of view  that a particular situation can be improved and we can move forward into a better future. I don't actually believe that as anyone who has read my earlier writings will know. We are living at a time of spiritual rejection in which forces inimical to goodness and truth are manipulating reality for their own ends. This current unrest is part of that. The most important thing, it seems to me, is not to allow oneself to be sucked into a pattern of hatred and recrimination. At the same time, never compromise with truth.

White Civilisation Matters

At least, it used to matter.  Now, white civilisation appears content to allow itself to be dismantled bit by bit but once upon a time it produced the greatest art, science, literature, music, philosophy and religion that the human race has known. Other civilisations from Egypt to India to Persia to China to Japan to South and Central America have produced great and wonderful things but none has matched the achievements of the European civilisation which includes the American up to around 1969. Now, however, white civilisation has succumbed to defeatism and seems too enfeebled to stand up to those who would destroy it. Which probably means it is coming to an end.

Why do so many white people, especially young women, join the anti-racist cult because cult is what it is, requiring the abandonment of all other loyalities, including family loyalties, and unquestioning fealty to its dogmas? Apart from the virtue signalling and social status acquired, apart from the peer pressure and misplaced sense of justice, apart from self-hatred, apparently far more common in liberals than conservatives, there is the indoctrinated belief that this is where truth and goodness lie. It's all about empathy, you are told, a feeling to which all other considerations must be subordinated. All generations in their youth seek to distance themselves from the ones that came before and see themselves as more advanced. This is the way the present generation think they can do that though they are not the first by any means. But now that there is no real religion the religious impulse has to seek an outlet elsewhere and morality must be expressed in a different manner. To condemn someone purely on the grounds of skin colour is obviously wrong. Slavery was obviously wrong. But it is very simplistic to think that because of these things all human groups are the same. However, the anti-racists are very simplistic. At least, those swept up in the cult are. The leaders are no doubt skilled in the art of propaganda and manipulation.

There is no excuse for what black people have suffered at the hands of those who have exploited them but there comes a time when you have to take responsibility for yourself and not refer back to past injustice as an explanation for present ills. Black people have been victims but it would be healthier if the community faced up to the reality of itself, starting out with the high levels of criminality among its young men. I would suggest that what the black community really needs now is what all human beings need and that is a strong religion, preferably Christianity. In the absence of that it may find it more difficult to deal with modern life than some other groups, partly because the evolutionary path that has formed it has not best qualified it to live in the kind of world that those whose path has been different have created.

So many articles in the media that even dare criticise the recent riots still qualify their criticism with remarks such as "There is inequality in the UK. There is prejudice, and there are things to be done." This may be so but the problem is that it gives way to the anti-racist narrative from the start, just as the right has done to the left for years which is why it has constantly lost the argument and we have shifted so far leftwards. Despite what you may have been told, white people have made significant efforts to accommodate a very different group of people in their midst. The recent protests and riots sparked off by the death of George Floyd appear cynical attempts to exploit a tragic situation. The agenda of the protest organisers is far more radical than simply drawing attention to black problems with the police, problems which when you actually examine the statistics are hard to put down to simple prejudice*. In fact, today there are strong grounds for saying it is the intolerant anti-racists who spread racial hatred more than anyone else because their stance is fundamentally anti-white. As for inequality, this has existed always and everywhere for many reasons and is less now than it ever has been. It's largely a by-product of freedom. And prejudice may exist privately but it doesn't officially except in certain areas where it is chiefly against whites rather than blacks. If you don't believe that, look at the media. The much criticised white privilege is largely the result of white intelligence, creativity and hard work, an earned privilege if you want to call it privilege, the fruits of which in the form of science, medicine, technology etc all other races take full advantage of. Was it white privilege that created the cathedrals and the Renaissance or that was responsible for Dante, Shakespeare, Mozart, Goethe and literally thousands of others?  If you're unsuccessful, is it always somebody else's fault?

White civilisation established higher values and standards than any other which was the result of its Christian roots and its own genius. These have been built up over centuries but they can be lost very rapidly if we don't make strenuous efforts to preserve them. Order, which is the basis of the universe, can soon descend into disorder, the disorder we see in the riots and which would soon spread throughout society if the protests, which are merely the passive side of the riots, had their way.  People might say that someone like me has never suffered from the prejudice that is directed against black people. True and I don't condone bad behaviour in any form but, as I said in the previous post, officially sanctioned prejudice ended in 1965. Besides, it might be countered that many indigenous English men and women have seen their country turned into a place in which they no longer feel they belong. And not a better place.

However, my interest is not political or nationalistic but spiritual and I write from that perspective. So let me conclude this piece by saying it is not actually white civilisation that matters but the higher standards and values that this civilisation established and developed over several centuries. I don't see the protestors against white civilisation capable of taking up the challenge of preserving, upholding and deepening these values and standards. What I do see is many who would lose them in the name of an anti-racism which, in its zeal for levelling and pulling down, destroys the hierarchy of truth on which cosmic order is based.

* There are all sorts of statistics to do with violent crime and murder, all pointing in the same direction. Here's one.  https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/htus8008.pdf. In 2008 in America young black males representing about 1% of the population counted for 27% of all homicide offenders. The corresponding figures for young white men were 6% and 16%, a vast difference which really cannot all be explained away by respective environments even though that clearly has something to do with it. 

A Question on Race

My question is this. At the present time does more spiritual evil come from racial discrimination or from the forces of anti-racism? We are talking of such things as pride, anger, hatred, resentment, aggression and self-righteousness. Before you answer that question look at the faces of recent protestors to see what is inspiring them. Observe how they respond to those who disagree with them. The answer might not be what you have been led to expect.

But fundamentally the question is not about racism or anti-racism whatever these words even mean nowadays. It is about truth and goodness. What is the truth of human races? Do they exist and if they do how should one best deal with their reality? If races do exist (and obviously they do, to argue otherwise shows a blatant disregard for reality), they will be different. Are these differences merely superficial or are they significant? Remember it is truth we want not ideology or wishful thinking.

Once truth has been arrived at, and only then for truth is the bedrock of everything, goodness can come into play. If the races really are pretty much the same in every respect save superficial ones there is no problem. But if there are differences that are more than skin deep, differences caused by separate evolutionary paths over thousands of years, we must know how to manage them. We cannot ignore them if they are real. They will come back to haunt us if we do. Alternatively, we cannot allow them to override the common humanity of all the races. There is a balance that must be struck and we can only arrive at the correct solution to the problem, and clearly there is a problem, if we apply both truth and goodness to it.

Now unfortunately we are doing neither. We seem to prefer ignorance and self-righteousness. We talk of empathy and how one must feel for the victims of the past but empathy without intelligence is just sentimentality and will lead to disaster because it ignores facts, replacing them with feelings. What are the facts of race? What are the facts of current suffering? The child always looks for someone else to blame. The mature adult takes responsibility for himself.

Racial discrimination in the past has caused great suffering and is condemned by practically everyone. But it was made illegal in the UK in 1965. That's 55 years ago. I am not so naive as to think that solved the problem but it did make discrimination on the grounds of race against the law. Discrimination may still take subtle forms but from a legal point of view the battle was won long ago. Campaigners are reduced to talking about microaggressions and it really does seem that the more such people are given, they more they want. Legitimate requests to be treated with fairness become greedy demands for preferential treatment and there is the sense that anti-racists will never be satisfied until they have reduced their supposed oppressors to the state of servitude. That is why, to return to the question asked at the beginning of this essay, I say it is they who are currently the ones fostering hatred.

God is the God of all human beings and we are all one in God. But that does not mean we are all the same or even all equal. It just means we are all one in God. It also means that the only way to realise this oneness is to turn to God for it is only in him that real oneness and real love can be found. It is also only to him or his representative on Earth that one should kneel. The present act of submissive subservience known as 'taking the knee' is therefore a diabolical inversion of a spiritual act and should be resisted by anyone who has any respect for God or even, quite frankly, anyone who has any self-respect. 

Evil now advances by appealing to people's sense of justice and fairness but this is just a front for its real but unrevealed agenda which is the destruction of higher truths and spiritual order. The current anti-racist protests follow a familiar pattern. Do not be deceived by the apparent plausibility of their demands. The devil was always a liar and a deceiver and the real goal behind these, whether the participants on the streets know it or not, is destruction.

Collapse

We are living through the collapse of Western civilisation and it is astonishing how few people seem to realise this. I suppose the average person can't face hard reality and as long as he is personally comfortable will ignore all the signs of societal breakdown. Everything seems fine from a superficial point of view. Some who do acknowledge reality believe the collapse will be a long drawn out one with gradual decline so it will not be in our day that things come to a crash but the speed at which events are currently moving suggest this may not be the case.

When a culture loses confidence in itself as the West has done, it is more or less doomed. If it will not defend itself because of weakness, cowardice and sentimentality as we have seen is the case over the last few days, it is a lost cause. And if it no longer recognises proper authority as built up by a tradition informed by truth and goodness and one that honours God or at least some transcendent principle then it moves from a phase of creativity to one of destruction. We have been on that path for 50 years or more. That is to say, a point was reached around 50 years ago when the balance between good and evil tilted decisively in favour of the latter, notwithstanding the fact that there had been crises before. But this was the time when our civilisation decided to take the path that leads to net evil.

The onset of liberalism always betokens the end of a civilisation. It is the phase when the fruits of that civilisation begin to be eaten with no new seeds planted. The relaxing of principles, discipline and sexual morality gradually erodes proper structure and order, and a focus on egalitarianism, the inevitable bedfellow of liberalism, means that the quantitative is emphasised at the expense of the qualitative which diminishes in importance. What else is the current obsession with racism but a sign that quantity has triumphed over quality? It's the same with all movements that tend towards levelling out. They all deny difference and so deny quality. That means they sacrifice truth to lower order human emotions such as resentment, fear, envy and hatred. These are the driving forces behind so much that happens in the world today and the fact they are given their head, and that their ugly faces are daubed with prettifying make up which, like all make up, is a mask of artificiality, confirms we have lost sight of reality and embarked on a path of spiritual destruction. When vice is depicted as virtue society has given itself over to the lie because it shows that it cares more about appearance than reality.

Human beings have a religious impulse which when thwarted in normal channels turns to abnormal ones in order to be expressed. People have a need to believe in something greater than themselves. If the natural outlet for this is closed tight shut it will take unnatural forms. Remove God from their lives and false idols rise up to take his place. This can be art or science but more often it is politics as it usually is now. Often the more extreme the better because extremism exaggerates the believer's sense of virtue for following the true path and gives him an enemy to hate which is very empowering.   Utopia would arrive if only the evil opponents of the truth could be scattered. This sense of us and them works in religion too where it can have some positive effects if disciplined and not allowed to descend into hatred but when it is invested in a lie, and all political ideologies are basically lies because they are products of human attempts to improve the world without God, it results in a type of monomania which is not far removed from insanity.

The over-reaction to coronavirus shows that we are a society ruled by fear. It also shows the dishonesty of the political class and the media, both of which are only interested in their own advancement with truth a near irrelevancy. We have known that for some time but it has been confirmed beyond doubt over recent months. The establishment, the totality of it, is rotten beyond repair. Its hypocrisy in seamlessly moving from the insistence of locking people up in their own homes to condoning mass public riots and protests sparked off by an incident that in no way represents a universal truth but is represented as such is quite breathtaking in its brazen audacity. We now see forces running loose in America that wish to destroy it and turn it into a third world country and these same forces have come to Europe where, under the guise of seeking justice, they work for destruction, deceiving the foolish, the naive and the resentful into supporting them. This is all part of the ongoing process of collapse, a process we are too weak, too cowardly and too much lacking in inner truthfulness to arrest.

Collapse will happen. It is happening at a pace which can only accelerate. There is nothing the ordinary honest person can do about it. But it is an external thing. What we can do is defend our own soul against the spiritual virus that is sweeping the world. Do not follow the herd. Put your faith in God and recognise that these times are inevitable. Nothing in this world is made to last except for the truth of Christ. Everything decays and falls to pieces and when it does that is because it has come to the end of its usefulness. But there are things that do last and these are the things we should concentrate on at a time when the outer world is collapsing into ruin. They are the eternal truths of God. As much as possible ignore what is happening in the world, not by turning a blind eye to it but by refusing to get caught up in it, and focus on the spiritual reality of the higher world. This is a time of testing to see who really wants God and how much they want him. Sacrifices will have to be made but these are to make us worthy of God. Would you want to come before him with an impure heart?

Many souls are already lost as we can see every time we turn on the news. The anger, hatred, self-righteousness and complacency of so many is clear to see. In order not to become part of this number it is essential not to be drawn into ideological debate but to keep one's attention firmly fixed on the truth and reality of God. The demons entrap souls into their world firstly by luring them into false ideologies which fan the flames of already existing hatred and resentment, and secondly by causing those more enlightened people who see the disastrous effects of these ideologies to resist them, dragging them down into a reactive cesspool of emotional negativity. It's better just to know and speak the truth but not enter into debate with the other side. That is just a trap designed to pull you down to their level. State the truth but do not enter into argument. The truth will convince those who have the truth within them. Argument convinces nobody.

It is not hard to predict that things will continue on a downward path. In fact, the pace of decline will augment. Look on it as a death. Death destroys the body to release the soul. Where the soul goes depends on the state of that soul. Don't worry about the dying body which cannot be restored. Fix your attention on the soul.

Be Nice, Be Kind

These are the rules of the new world order coming into being. Who could go against such decency but what do these injunctions really signify?  Scratch the surface to go behind the pleasant exterior and you see something rather different.

Be good and conform. Don't rock the boat, obey the status quo. Put the group, as defined by the authorities, before yourself. Sustain the system.

Evil is not going to put itself in a bad light now. Its tactics have changed from simple destruction to assimilation and so in order to deceive as many people as possible it must pretend to be good. But the goodness it pretends to is one that fortifies itself because it will not countenance a real spiritual goodness that puts the source and end of good beyond this world. It will only accept a goodness that reinforces its God-denying materialism and flattening of the hierarchy of qualities to an egalitarian orthodoxy in which nothing is fundamentally better than anything else.

Being kind implies wishing for the good of a person and working for that good. But this raises the question of what is the good? Merely being kind is meaningless. Am I kind to the child that I keep stuffing with ice cream? Am I kind when I allow that same child to go out with his friends when he should be doing his homework? It might seem so to the child but obviously I am not being kind at all. I am just indulging both the child and myself either because I am stupid or irresponsible or weak or simply want to be liked. Being kind is a totally meaningless injunction on its own, the product of short-sighted sentimentality and ignorance. Sometimes being apparently unkind is the kindest way to be. It all depends what the goal is.

God allows suffering in this world. Is he unkind? He's clearly not nice as conventionally understood. The fact of suffering makes people deny God but they conveniently ignore the fact of everything else. There is obviously more good than bad in human life or we would all kill ourselves but hardly any of us do. However, I am straying from the point. The point is God is not kind by the accepted canons of the day so perhaps kindness, niceness, is not the prime virtue. That obviously does not mean the opposite is true. We certainly should be kind but we should be kind in the context of knowing what the true good is. Without that knowledge kindness will quickly degrade into the enabling of evil.

Noise and Silence

Now that the lockdown in England is ending the world is getting noisy again. One of the many pleasant side-effects of the enforced restrictions of the past 10 weeks (cleaner air being another) has been the relative peace and quiet. The racket of the modern world has been subdued and it has made me realise how I am constantly having to mentally defend myself from noise and this can be a very exhausting process. Anyone of any sensitivity has to do this. Practically all the time we are assaulted (there is no other word for it) by noise.

It is a commonplace now to say that the world gets noisier and noisier. The means of creating sound and making it louder become ever more sophisticated and available to everyone. The roar of traffic, the unholy din of pop music, planes overhead and so on. There are so many contributory factors. Even people are louder now than they used to be. All this simply drowns out the human ability to respond in any way to the spiritual world for this can only be truly detected in an atmosphere of quiet.

That doesn't mean complete silence. The sounds of nature do not generally interfere with spiritual response. But mechanical sounds, artificially created sounds and human sounds originating from the level of ego consciousness generally do. It is these that have become so ubiquitous and so loud for it is a twofold problem of volume and constancy.

Could one of the reasons for the dramatic decline in spiritual belief be because of the dramatic rise of noise? The latter will certainly feed the former because of the distraction it creates, distraction from deeper sensibility, together with the fact that it fixes a person subjected to it firmly in the material world. Not just the physical world but the artificial environment created by modern humanity that separates us not only from spirit but from nature too. Modern noise is produced by this world and it intensifies the quality of this world in our mind. It literally imprisons us in this world.

I see little prospect of human beings escaping the dominance of materialism if noise is not controlled. But firstly we must want to control it and too many people not only do not want this but actually seem to enjoy noise. And even many who do not enjoy it do not seem to mind it. Of course, our dislike of noise increases as we get older but could this sometimes be because we are, on a certain level, trying to prepare for entry into the spiritual world and noise is the number one obstacle to that?

Silence is a blessed gift from God and is the state in which we are best able to find God. When the outer world is shut down to an extent then we can enter the inner world. The prevalence of noise in modern times must certainly be one of the tools employed by the anti-spiritual powers to separate us from our true and deeper selves and keep us locked in a world without God.