The Next Ten Years

We are living in the spiritual ruins of Western civilisation. I don't say the decline but the ruins. It is extraordinary how few people see this but I suppose that's the point. If more people saw it then it wouldn't be the ruins. Something would be done. Part of the problem is that the idea of virtue has not collapsed so we are not living in an anarchic, every man for himself free for all. But virtue has been reduced to something with no transcendent aspect with the result that it relates to the horizontal plane only. That is to say, the material world alone. All things relating to the good, which are really rooted in the vertical and transcendent, have been brought down to the earthly. Truth, love and beauty have all lost their spiritual aspect and are reimagined in purely material terms. Of course, they have no substance and no proper source outside the spiritual so we are just left with the imitation of these things, the husk without the corn.

I've written a lot of apocalyptic sounding posts recently which must seem rather depressing. I apologise. But my excuse is that events have been considerably ramped up recently. The work of the last century is now bearing its poisoned fruit. The seed was planted, the tree grew, the evil flowers blossomed (in the 1960s one might say since that combined a certain beauty with great spiritual destruction), and now the fruit has ripened and we are being force fed it. Lies are everywhere, politics, art and science are all corrupted, the media is the propaganda arm of forces inimical to human good and even religion appears to be on its last legs.

The dominant ideology of the day is egalitarianism but this has not come about to raise the lower as we are led to believe. The real hidden motive behind it was always to bring down the higher. Egalitarianism inevitably means cultural relativism and brings in its train a universal levelling down. Once the higher is no longer acknowledged as higher, a word which includes the sense of better, it is effectively destroyed and the lower dominates. When the ladder of being, traditionally described as a tree with its roots in heaven, is not recognised it falls down and human life remains at ground level, as now. Today there is no means to climb up out of this world into a higher one whose values are different. These will include any values of this world but seen in a new and transforming light.

The next ten years will see a steady tightening of the grip of the egalitarian dogma used as a means to cut off access to any higher reality and restrict us to the material plane. Egalitarianism won't apply to the elites, of course, who will remain in control but it will be used as a way of preventing escape from that control by the ordinary man or woman. On the anticipated timescale it seems this might be complete by the year 2030. The idea is to erect a kind of psychological barrier all round the world with the words "No way out" stamped across it in big black letters. But this like so much else is a lie. There is always a way out and that is the full acceptance of God.

I am reminded of an old Indian teaching which I believe I first came across in the teaching of the 19th century Bengali saint Ramakrishna. He maintained that while in ancient times great efforts of asceticism and profound meditation were necessary to attain spiritual liberation, in the Kali Yuga (i.e. now) all that would be required would be to repeat the name of God with a humble and contrite heart. Conditions would be so grim that God in his mercy would allow just this one sincere act to be enough for salvation. Perhaps because to get even that far in such a degenerate time would imply great spiritual dedication.

Let this be a comfort in the days to come. We don't need to be spiritual supermen. We just need to turn to God in love and understanding of what his existence means, what it demands and what it gives. Though there will undoubtedly be trials, these will end in triumph.