Remember The Creator review

My book Remember the Creator was reviewed on Amazon recently by someone who didn't like it. Fair enough, it's not for everyone. However, in my opinion the reviewer not only failed to understand the book, he has misrepresented it so I would like to offer a few words in response here.

To begin with, the reviewer appears to be reacting from something in his own past which has caused him to reject Christianity and the book gets caught up in that as it seems to have been read through the prism of his prejudices. He talks of a "powerful spiritual experience which led me away from the Bible narrative into a higher, more forgiving spiritual experience and deep intuitive connection with God". I can appreciate that but I sometimes think spiritual experiences do more harm than good because they can be like strong alcohol to one unaccustomed to it. The intoxication can make one focus too much on the bliss and unitive feelings to the detriment of a deeper spiritual understanding. Feelings can overwhelm sense so that theological and metaphysical verities that take form as dogmas and doctrines can appear superficial and rigid. However, the spiritual path is not about feelings, no matter how exalted they might seem. It is about understanding.

The reviewer calls me a fundamentalist Christian and says that I have "rejected truth outside of literal biblical scripture".  I have no idea how he comes to that conclusion. I am more usually criticised for the opposite, too catholic (small c) in my beliefs, too heterodox. Again, I think he is reacting to what he used to think or a situation he grew up in not to what I am saying. I see where he might have got this idea if he wasn't paying attention for the book does compare the Christian revelation with Buddhism and advaita Vedanta and puts the former on a higher plane, essentially because it values creation and integrates spirit with matter rather than dismissing matter as basically unreal or, at least, irrelevant with no part to play in the greater scheme of things. But in no way does it dismiss other religions, of which I suspect I know rather more than he thinks I do. It simply sees them as incomplete in the light of Christ.

The reviewer writes from the perspective of someone who was brought up in a rigid Christian background but has broken out of that and discovered other spiritual and mystical approaches which combine a modernistic humanism with the sense that Man is divine. In many ways this is an advance because it begins to replace unquestioned acceptance of external authority with personal insight. A problem with this approach, though, is that it sees the light of God reflected at second hand in Man but does not properly acknowledge the source of that light. Spiritual humanism is very common today but it is actually a form of spiritual materialism in that it values immanence over transcendence, prioritising the created over the Creator. The title of the book contains a simple remedy for that error.

My reviewer doesn't like the idea of hell or judgment, thinking these are signs of an authoritarian God who demands obedience, and that this kind of God is implied in my book. There are certainly some Biblically based writings that do give this impression but I cannot for the life of me see how Remember the Creator does. God is real and God is truth and to deny God is to deny truth. That's about as far as the book goes. As for judgment, all sane people must judge unless you believe that any kind of belief or behaviour is as good as any other kind. Criticising judgment is judging. God does not punish like a petty and vindictive tyrant but actions and even thoughts have their own consequences. A darkened mind creates darkness for itself. So some kind of hell probably does exist but it is built by us. Naturally, there is always forgiveness but for that to be operative there must be repentance. This is something frequently ignored by the liberal approach to spirituality and religion, but to do so makes a mockery of truth.

The difference between me and my reviewer is that I see Christ as central to the spiritual quest, despite other valid approaches, and he does not. I believe he is reacting to Christ as seen through the earthly mind of mortal man, as he is presented in some forms of outer religion. But there is an inner Christ too who is perceived intuitively and who exists in heaven as the universal teacher of angels and men, of all souls whatever their earthly background or cultural upbringing. 

My reviewer was basically rejecting Christianity in favour of Eastern religion forgetting, like many Westerners who follow that route, that they are not comparing like with like. For they reject the public or more conventional form of their familiar religion without being properly cognisant of its deeper, more mystical side. And then they do the reverse with the new belief system. They ignore the public religious side and take up the mystical elements.

I would like to say to the reviewer that I have the greatest respect for Eastern religions which I have known and studied for many years. They come from God or however you want to define spiritual reality. I don't think everyone has to be a Christian to know God and many non-Christians are closer to him than many Christians. But I do maintain that Christ is the light that lightens all spiritual understanding whether he is revealed or hidden. This is a great truth, the recognition of which doesn't make you a fundamentalist but the most universal of universalists. In esotericism, Christ is called the Great Initiator and everyone has to pass through his door on the inner planes before reaching the true heavenly world. 

I commend my reviewer for moving away from a form of religion which he felt was no longer suitable to express his growing awareness of the deeper aspects of life. I actually did a similar thing myself many years ago. The search for God is the most important thing for any human being to be engaged in, and not enough people take this anywhere near seriously enough. My reviewer obviously does and I wish him Godspeed on his journey. I do think, though, that time may bring him to the realisation that Christ is not just an ancient Jewish prophet but the true light that dwells in the heart of all human beings, whatever their culture or beliefs.

What's (Possibly) To Come

Psychics announce that 2021 will see a big improvement in our way of life with everything set to get better.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/dec/26/im-getting-clarity-a-time-that-will-feel-lighter-psychics-share-their-2021-predictions

Well, that's a relief. However, I have an alternative prediction which is that things will get worse but that it doesn't matter. Things will get worse because of the huge success of the lockdowns and the masks and the complicity of most populations in their own ongoing servitude. The natural reduction of infections that always happens when the spring arrives will be hailed as a triumph for the vaccines, but the precautions that we have accepted are here to stay in one form or another and can be rolled out again at any time. They aren't going away. The increasing control of governments over their people will spread into more and more areas of life but it will be managed so that most people who want to ignore it can do so. They will be given explanations for this control that appear to justify it, and they will think it is for their own good or protection or whatever other reason that will be dragged up. The destruction of traditional and natural understanding will proceed with all official bodies, including churches, joining in.

But it doesn't matter. This is a time of darkness and those who have any kind of spiritual sensibility will feel that acutely. It affects us not only outwardly but inwardly too. God may seem very distant but I would liken this to a time of crucifixion. The life of Christ prefigured the life of any disciple. It was a kind of template for those who would follow him. We may feel spiritually forsaken but God is there. We may be ridiculed by mainstream opinion but that is just worldly wisdom that has rejected the Creator. We are being tested in the fire and all we have to do is keep our trust in God, however far away he seems. It's time to prove ourselves worthy of entering his kingdom. Did you think that was going to happen without a great effort? Remember that the sun is always there behind the clouds.

Christmas Light

 If there was ever a time when we awaited light to be born in darkness, it is surely now. The darkness is all the more intense because most people don't recognise it for what it is. But those who do recognise it perceive that we live in a time of very great darkness.

For darkness read spiritual ignorance which results in spiritual evil. It would surprise many people to be told that now is a time of great evil. Are we not more enlightened than ever with our progressive attitudes of empathy and equality? Do we not care for others more? Have we not largely overcome cruelty and become more compassionate than our ancestors? This is all quite true. We do have more sympathy with the other than we used to, externally, at least, but ask yourself why this is. Could it be we have more feeling for material suffering because we are more materialistic?  Nicolai Berdyaev seemed to imply this when he wrote as follows in his work The Destiny of Man from 1931.

"Modern civilised man cannot stand cruelty, suffering or pain, and he is more pitying than men of earlier times, not because he stands above them morally and spiritually. He has come to be more afraid of pain and suffering, has become softer and less courageous and fearless: he has less endurance. He has weakened, spiritually. This is the reverse side of the increase in sympathy and pity, the lessening of cruelty."

In other words, have we become more compassionate not because of an increase in spiritual understanding but a decrease? Have we so lost focus on the spiritual plane that all our attention is transferred to the material so that what seems as an advance is actually a grave loss? I would suggest that much of our modern empathy comes from our disconnect from higher levels of being. When our entire being is materially focused that sphere becomes the centre of our attention. It seems we are more compassionate but our compassion is really only directed towards the earthly man. Christmas is there to remind us of the spiritual man and to tell us that this little limited earthly self is by no means all there is to us. In fact, it is merely the projection of the soul in 3 dimensional space. It is not even our real self. It is part of the totality of our being and so of course it should not be neglected or denied. Its suffering should certainly be relieved as much as possible within the bounds of spiritual good. But Christ did not come to remove suffering. He came to sanctify it so that it could be the means of redemption, the way whereby the soul could be liberated from identification with the earthly self. The birth of spiritual light in material darkness, which is what Christmas is, should point us towards that deep truth. The light comes from beyond this world. There is nothing in this world that can save us or liberate us from the pain and suffering to be found here. It is only by following that spiritual light from beyond the darkness of matter that we can really find both ourselves and our freedom from suffering.

This is a time of great evil but we don't see it because we don't acknowledge spirit. We know and recognise material evil but we don't see how we have fallen into spiritual evil. Evil is what damages good. We see what damages material or earthly good while at the same time perpetuating the attitudes that damage spiritual good. We are guilty of great spiritual evil, perhaps more than any previous generation. The light in darkness that is Christmas should awaken us to that and bring us back to our spiritual senses.

Jupiter and Saturn Conjunction

Towards the end of the last century I made a study of astrology. I happened to be living in a place where I could get a good view of the night sky without too much light pollution and so I became interested in astronomy too, and the one fed into the other. Previously, I had a rough knowledge of astrological principles, enough to know there was certainly something in it, but never looked at the subject seriously. When I did and examined horoscopes of people I knew well, I discovered that a person's birth chart was an extremely accurate portrayal of that person's character. When you took all the different aspects of the chart into account, the signs the planets were in, the angular relationships between the planets and so on, you could build up a good description of that person although, as this was as much an art as a science, the symbolism in the chart still needed to be interpreted in context. Which is as it should be since human beings are not machines. It means that materialistic science will always have a problem with astrology (the sun sign nonsense in magazines doesn't help either), but it nicely illustrates the tension between freedom and destiny that marks human nature.

December 21st will see a very close conjunction between Jupiter and Saturn when the two large planets will appear to form a single 'star'. Astrologically, this conjunction, not infrequent in itself but rarely this close, is a curiosity because the principles behind these planets are exact opposites. Jupiter is the principle of expansion, of generosity and benevolence but potentially of excess as well. Saturn is the principle of contraction, old age, caution and fear, but also discipline and structure. Their coming together could be seen as each balancing the other and could be creative or not depending on how things work out plus, as always, other factors in the overall picture. Interestingly, this conjunction takes place right as the very beginning of Aquarius, Saturn being already there and Jupiter just about to move into that sign.

Here are some events that took place on previous occasions when this so-called 'Great Conjunction' occurred. This comes from the Daily Telegraph.

7BC: Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, also a period estimated to have seen Christ's birth. It was at this time that Augustus' second census recorded a total of 4,233,000 Roman citizens across the empire.

March 4, 1226: The last time a ‘Great Conjunction’ occurred that was as easy to see as this year’s. That year the English town of Nuneaton was granted chartered market status by King Henry III and King Sancho II of Portugal launched a large offensive against the Muslims, taking the city of Elvas.

July 16, 1623: The last time Jupiter and Saturn were as close as they will be on Monday. In the same year the "First Folio" edition of William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies is published and the English settlers at the Plymouth Plantation in Massachusetts celebrate their second Thanksgiving.

As listed, nothing of particular earth-shattering importance happened. Nuneaton granted market status? Excellent for local traders, I'm sure, but, on the scale of important world events, hardly significant. 

However, there is something about those dates which is interesting. The first of course is around the time of Christ's birth and the fact that the conjunction this year is on the day of the winter solstice, which is possibly one reason for Christmas being when it is, is intriguing. But the second could be seen as the beginning of the High Middle Ages when the world of Christendom really began to mature and express itself in a myriad different ways. And 1623 is as good a date as any for the start of the modern era. The colonisation of America, the rise of science, these are what makes our world today what it is. Obviously, such enormous changes cannot be pinned down to a date but it is, at the least, interesting that previous Great Conjunctions have occurred at times of significant change.

This means, if it means anything, that nothing dramatic should be expected immediately but the Great Conjunction may signal the beginning of a new stage in human existence. It is one sign among many that point to the current times being out of the ordinary.

Most people simply don't want to wake up

Bruce Charlton had a post recently about how the great majority of people are sleeping through the tremendous changes that are currently taking place, changes that have been prepared for over several decades but which are now actually happening. He makes the point that people seem happy to live in a world of lies or the Big Lie because they fear the responsibility and commitment that acknowledging this would demand. 

The radical change of thought required to see through the spiritual corruption of the present day does indeed ask a lot of anyone. It means a fundamental reevaluation of everything. It means rejecting ground that had seemed solid and advancing into new territory which is often shrouded in mists. The mists may clear from time to time and we may be granted a vision of a new and glorious land but then they close in again. It is natural to feel fear and doubt and to want to retreat to the security of the familiar, but to do this is increasingly going to mean turning a blind eye to reality. 

Most people don't want to wake up because that would mean accepting we live in a world in which everything is out of kilter with reality, and not just randomly but deliberately made so. It really means coming to terms with the fact of evil. But we don't believe in evil because we don't believe in good, and we don't believe in good, not real good, because we don't believe in God. There is no good without God but when there is this God-given good that means there is also evil. This is a fact of life. This does not mean a dualistic world in which good and evil have equal power. Evil is just the denial or rejection of good and has no substantial creative reality other than that. But it does have that limited reality.

When you stir a pond with a stick all the muck comes to the surface. This is what is happening now. Evil is being allowed its way for a while, and for two reasons, I think. One, to clean it out of the system it must be expressed. Maybe it's like lancing a boil. And two, its predominance constitutes a real test of human souls. Will they perceive it for what it is and stand against it, even if that is only internally? Or while they go along with it for personal advantage or simply because not to do so requires too great an effort? Through laziness or cowardice. Will they wake up to it or will they just let it have its way because not to do so demands more of them, whether in terms of sacrifice or intellectual effort or spiritual commitment, than they are prepared to give? 

Today evil is being done through people who may not be recognisably evil in themselves but who are not properly focused on the real good. This is the great test of our time because if you aren't actively oriented towards the real good, you will be swept up by evil. If you don't consciously reject evil, it will ensnare you.

Unfortunately, it seems that so far most people don't want to wake up and so I'm afraid that things will undoubtedly get worse before they get better. It's up to those of us who do see through the lies to provide good examples so that others can follow further down the line. We must not just condemn the evil (note to self!) but live and proclaim the good. After all, the evil is irrelevant. It is the good that matters. The Good News remains what it has been for 2,000 years. It is the glory of the resurrection in Christ that we should be focussing on not just the deviant wickedness of these days.

The Corruption of the Good & the Lack of Imagination

Whatever good there may once have been in leftism has long since been used to smuggle in greater evil, and the chief evil is materialism and the separation from God with the subsequent celebration of man as his own god. Thus, the concept of the good is changed radically. No longer does it relate to spiritual understanding and focus and to one's relationship with God, but to the human being as it exists in this world. And no longer is the good a matter of objective reality, something with its own independent quality and truth beyond the merely human, but what bring most benefit to most people in a purely worldly sense.

This is why when you talk to a committed leftist, you talk at cross purposes. His idea of good revolves around what increases happiness and reduces suffering in the here and now. He has an enormously limited view of what a human being actually is and that deforms his whole judgement. Even if he is religious or spiritual in some way this will always be subject to his determining leftism, and leftism is fundamentally materialistic in that it sees man as he is in his fallen, almost biological, state and not as a spiritual being.

The question then arises as to why is the leftist like that. Is he just labouring under a delusion through no fault of his own or is his attitude actually a reflection of his own mind and will?  For some it may be the former but for many it is the latter case. A leftist philosophy (ideology is a better word) is the outcome of the wilful rejection of God.

That much is clear but I believe there is often something more and that is a lack of imagination. It is amusing to think of the howls of outrage one would hear from leftists if they were accused of lacking imagination but what other conclusion can you reasonably draw? Imagination is not just conjuring up and playing with a bundle of images and ideas. It is sensitivity to the higher worlds. It is openness to a greater reality. It is, in its proper sense, a spiritual faculty and if you have it you will see that spiritual reality exists. You will, at the very least, be strongly pushed in that direction even if you hesitate to embrace the notion fully because of the limited presentation of religion in this world.

This takes us to the great problem with many church-going Christians which is that they too lack imagination so their idea of religion is restricted to the moral world or to the world of belief as stipulated by authority. But this is a desiccated kind of faith that does not inspire or transform. It leaves its members in the world. Imagination is the only thing that can get us out of this world. It is not enough on its own. It must be coupled with a proper religious understanding but it points to and begins to reveal the reality of higher dimensions of being, and a refusal to acknowledge these higher dimensions certainly indicates an unimaginative mind which is ipso facto an unspiritual mind.

How Things Change and the Prophecy of Hermes

Not being racist used to mean white people not being nasty to black people, treating them fairly and honestly. But then it changed and meant not acknowledging there was any reality to the concept of race at all and that all groups were equal in every respect with no distinguishing characteristics apart from superficial ones like skin colour. And more recently it has changed again so it now means the tacit acceptance that black people are, in fact, superior to white people, morally superior by virtue of what they have suffered, and if you don't accept this you are a white supremacist.  Indeed, you can now get called a white supremacist merely if you value and want to preserve the good things of Western civilisation.

Not being a sexist used to mean not behaving badly towards women, treating them with proper respect. Then it meant not acknowledging there was any difference between men and women at all and that they were both fundamentally the same, except physically of course. But now it means, tacitly at least, accepting that women are superior to men who are fundamentally flawed. And even the physical differences are being challenged.

The same applies with regard to homosexuals and transsexuals  and any number of groups who were previously marginalised or not regarded as top of the hierarchy. It is the revenge of the underclasses as rankings are reversed. 

The question is, does any of this matter? Is it just the inevitable over-reaction as human beings move towards creating a more equitable society with things eventually sorting themselves out? Or is it a real problem as natural hierarchies are disrupted, indeed inverted, with the result of a collapse of civilised values and a divided world. Is it a recipe for increased harmony and justice or will it lead to a descent into chaos and antagonism? The answer is clear when we look at the world now. It mirrors the state of affairs predicted in the famous Prophecy of Hermes which concerned what would befall ancient Egypt but which in a certain manner can also apply to us today since the downfall of civilisations always follows a similar pattern.

"Since it is fitting that wise men should have knowledge of all events before they come to pass, you must not be left in ignorance of this: there will come a time when it will be seen that in vain have the Egyptians honoured the deity with heartfelt piety and assiduous service; and all our holy worship will be found bootless and ineffectual. For the gods will return from earth to heaven.

Egypt will be forsaken, and the land which was once the home of religion will be left desolate, bereft of the presence of its deities.

This land and region will be filled with foreigners; and Egypt will be occupied by Scythians or Indians or by some such race from the barbarian countries thereabout. In that day will our most holy land, this land of shrines and temples, be filled with funerals and corpses. 

Do you weep at this, Asclepius? There is worse to come; Egypt herself will have yet more to suffer; she will fall into a far more piteous plight, and will be infected with yet more, grievous plagues; and this land, which once was holy, a land which loved the gods, and wherein alone, in reward for her devotion, the gods deigned to sojourn upon earth, a land which was the teacher of mankind in holiness and piety, this land will go beyond all in cruel deeds. The dead will far outnumber the living; and the survivors will be known for Egyptians by their tongue alone, but in their actions they will seem to be men of another race.

O Egypt, Egypt, of thy religion nothing will remain but an empty tale, which thine own children in time to come will not believe; nothing will be left but graven words, and only the stones will tell of thy piety. And in that day men will be weary of life, and they will cease to think the universe worthy of reverent wonder and of worship. And so religion, the greatest of all blessings, for there is nothing, nor has been, nor ever shall be, that can be deemed a greater boon, will be threatened with destruction; men will think it a burden, and will come to scorn it. They will no longer love this world around us, this incomparable work of God, this glorious structure which he has built, this sum of good made up of things of many diverse forms, this instrument whereby the will of God operates in that which he has made, ungrudgingly favouring man’s welfare, this combination and accumulation of all the manifold things that can call forth the veneration, praise, and love of the beholder.

Darkness will be preferred to light, and death will be thought more profitable than life; no one will raise his eyes to heaven ; the pious will be deemed insane, and the impious wise; the madman will be thought a brave man, and the wicked will be esteemed as good. As to the soul, and the belief that it is immortal by nature, or may hope to attain to immortality, as I have taught you, all this they will mock at, and will even persuade themselves that it is false. No word of reverence or piety, no utterance worthy of heaven and of the gods of heaven, will be heard or believed.

And so the gods will depart from mankind, a grievous thing!, and only evil angels will remain, who will mingle with men, and drive the poor wretches by main force into all manner of reckless crime, into wars, and robberies, and frauds, and all things hostile to the nature of the soul. Then will the earth no longer stand unshaken, and the sea will bear no ships; heaven will not support the stars in their orbits, nor will the stars pursue their constant course in heaven; all voices of the gods will of necessity be silenced and dumb; the fruits of the earth will rot; the soil will turn barren, and the very air will sicken in sullen stagnation. After this manner will old age come upon the world. Religion will be no more; all things will be disordered and awry; all good will disappear.

But when all this has befallen, Asclepius, then the Master and Father, God, the first before all, the maker of that god who first came into being, will look on that which has come to pass, and will stay the disorder by the counterworking of his will, which is the good. He will call back to the right path those who have gone astray; he will cleanse the world from evil, now washing it away with water-floods, now burning it out with fiercest fire, or again expelling it by war and pestilence. And thus he will bring back his world to its former aspect, so that the Kosmos will once more be deemed worthy of worship and wondering reverence, and God, the maker and restorer of the mighty fabric, will be adored by the men of that day with unceasing hymns of praise and blessing.

Such is the new birth of the Kosmos; it is a making again of all things good, a holy and awe-striking restoration of all nature; and it is wrought in the process of time by the eternal will of God. For Gods will has no beginning; it is ever the same, and as it now is, even so it has ever been, without beginning. For it is the very being of God to purpose good.”

 

It is important that we keep in mind the conclusion of this prophecy. It is echoed in Indian religion where Krishna always restores the good after a period of universal collapse. We may be living in times of spiritual darkness but, in a way, this is only superficial. The only lasting reality is that of God.

 

Miss Marple and Goodness

The other night I watched one of the Miss Marple programmes with Joan Hickson as Agatha Christie's old lady detective. The programme was made in the late 1980s and it occured to me while watching that here was someone who was good in a very pure and clean way, a natural honest and unselfconscious way, and that this simply would not be possible nowadays. Miss Marple is a saintly kind of person. She really is. God and religion are not mentioned in the films but an awareness of them is everywhere in her character and her attitude to life. She acts and thinks in perfect knowledge of the reality of the divine and this is so absorbed in her heart that it informs her behaviour all the way from thought to emotion to action. She is not a Pharisee obeying the law because it is the law. She has moved beyond law to love. But note that her goodness does not sentimentalise her. She is unbending in her concern for truth which is what makes her such an excellent sleuth.

You might think this is a bit over the top but Joan Hickson's portrayal of Miss Marple shows a person who is good because she has identified herself with the source of goodness and that self is sufficiently softened so that it can receive the imprint of goodness as wax does a seal. She has become permeated by goodness because of her receptivity to it. This is all we can do. Goodness is not ours. It is God's. Our task is to soften the self, the heart, so that it can receive and hold the image of God within itself.  Miss Marple demonstrates someone with the stamp of God on her heart. 

I say this is not possible now. I mean it is very unlikely. It's always possible but the point is where do we take our idea of goodness from? Increasingly, it is not the idea of God, our Creator, the source of love and truth. It is state-sanctioned ideology. We cannot be transformed by this as we can be by opening ourselves up to the higher reality of God. We can only conform to it or obey it. Therefore, there is no real goodness. There is only the imitation and display of it. As I've said so often on this blog, true goodness can only be found in God. Miss Marple knows this even if she doesn't make a fuss about it.

Albion Awakening

 As this book doesn't appear in the sidebar on the right (not enough room) I thought I might bring it to the attention of any new readers of this blog. It is a compilation of writings by John Fitzgerald and myself, with an introduction by Bruce Charlton, from the Albion Awakening blog which ran from 2016 to 2019 and was very loosely connected to the Brexit debate of the time, though looked at from a spiritual rather than political perspective.

The back cover blurb reads as follows:

"Now that Britain has left the EU it's a good time to ask ourselves where we should be going from here. Albion Awakening is the fruit of several years’ speculation on the spiritual future of the British Isles. It includes articles on the history, mythology and current state of the country together with fictional meditations and suggestions of a new path we could take that would bring us closer to our destined goal. 

The book can be regarded as a ‘crash course’ in those people and events that make Albion - the phenomena that raise mere Britain to the mythic significance of Albion. It is intended to encourage all lovers of Albion in sustaining and growing the reality of our national myth. 

Albion still sleeps but the potential is there for awakening, even in our troubled times, if enough people can throw off their spiritual sloth and rediscover the light that shines deep in the heart of the country."

The book was written before the current coronavirus excitement which has unfortunately demonstrated the degree to which Albion is asleep and also shows the attempt to keep it "locked down" in that state. However, we should never forget  that while Albion may still sleep in the country as a whole its spirit can nevertheless be awakened in the heart of anyone who makes the spiritual effort to attune him or herself to its particular voice and essential quality. I see Albion as the national angel, the great spirit of the country, and all those who love that spirit can call it to life in their own souls, this whether they be inhabitants of these isles or not. Love is, as it always is, the key.

The paperback version can be found here.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1708664955

for the UK market 

and here for the American market.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1708664955

Kindle versions are here

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B085376XC2

and here

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B085376XC2

Experts

 No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you never should trust experts. If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require to have their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830-1903)

Nothing would be more fatal than for the Government of States to get into the hands of experts. Expert knowledge is limited knowledge and the unlimited ignorance of the plain man, who knows where it hurts, is a safer guide than any rigorous direction of a specialist.

Sir Winston Churchill

I took these two quotes from an excellent website called Lockdown Sceptics  which consistently makes the case that the coronavirus is not the great evil we are led to believe and that lockdowns do much more harm than good. They seem very appropriate at the present time when we have quite obviously been led up the garden path by people who may be specialists in their fields but are quite ignorant out of them. And that's giving them the benefit of the doubt and assuming they are honest which they may well not be.

It's very easy to mock people who are suspicious of experts. After all the word just means someone who knows what he's talking about, doesn't it? And why would we not listen to such a person? But the trouble is these people are often blinded by their own knowledge and unable to see other wisdom that stands outside that. They can't see the wood for a tree. They are the technocrats of the modern world, the scientists and engineers who want to take over governance from politicians and do things properly. But there are two serious problems here. Politicians, for all their manifold faults, can at least be voted out of office in a democracy. Theoretically, anyway. The technocrats would be there to stay. There would be no means in a society run by such people (as in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, for instance) of getting rid of them. There would be nobody to tell them they are wrong. And they often are wrong because they see the world in terms of data and spreadsheets. In terms of control which invariably will want to do away with individuality and freedom. The technocrat has no real understanding of human beings, of what it is to be human. He certainly has no spiritual understanding. By definition, he rejects that as not subject to his measurements or within his control. He prefers the committee to the individual but no committee ever made a true work of art or genuine scientific discovery.

The Marquess of Salisbury pinpoints what people distrust about experts. Apart from their inability to see the whole picture outside of their speciality, apart from their desire to contain and control, apart from their arrogance and materialism, overt or not, they do not properly acknowledge common sense. Common sense is the ability to see in terms of the whole rather than in parts. Experts only see in terms of parts because their expertise is necessarily a partial thing, limited to a small area which is all they can really see. They are very useful with regard to that small area but not when the matter concerns a greater whole. Even many experts together, unless they have the wisdom and humility to go beyond the expert mind, have the limitations of their class, a blinkered view and an inability to see human beings as multi-dimensional spiritual beings with purpose that goes beyond the mundane.

Obviously if I have a toothache I will go to a dentist and I'm very glad the person who looks at my teeth is not the same one that cuts my hair as once was the case. But we don't want experts to run the world because they will see it in terms of their own field. What politicians should do and what they have not been doing is listen to many sorts of experts from many fields and then take decisions based on all the input, ideally subjected to common sense, pragmatism, balance and the long term. But that requires an honest man who wants to do the right thing in respect of God and his fellow men and that's a rare beast now.

Freedom and Truth

It's been curious to see over the last 9 months how few people really seem to care about freedom. That may be because they are so used to it they don't recognise its gradual erosion but it may also be because they don't care as long as they are personally comfortable. That's a very short-term attitude because a reduction of freedom will certainly affect their degree of personal comfort soon enough.

Closely allied to a concern for freedom is a concern for truth. I have noticed that the very same individuals who will not stand up for freedom are often quite happy to ignore truth. The two things clearly go together as is obvious once you think about what they are. You cannot have truth without freedom and nor can you have freedom without truth. Not to value one means you don't value the other. 

So many people are spiritually irresponsible. This means that they perceive everything in terms of its impact on their own selves. They are the centre of their world. But a spiritual person sees God as the centre of the world, not himself, and God is the source of both freedom and truth. He is at once their ultimate origin and their only guarantor. Our loss of religious faith has brought in its train a loss of concern for truth because inevitably without religion we become unable to understand there even is such a thing as truth which exists beyond ourselves and our petty material interests. And when we forego truth we submit to power, the power of whatever group happens to dominate at the moment, and then we also forego freedom.

If you value freedom you must value truth, and if you value these things which are as essential for man's spiritual well-being as food and drink are for his body, then you must look to God, a divine being, as their only possible source. There is no freedom in the material world and without truth there is no meaning. Those who are prepared to sacrifice freedom and truth for expedience are basically nihilists and consequently will only find death. This is because freedom is what defines a human being. No other life form in this world has freedom. It is the mark of a spiritual being and its loss leads to the destruction of the spiritual aspect of human nature. If you are prepared to forego freedom, as so many people do seem prepared to do now, you are foregoing your very humanity.

Don't Be Unreasonable

I guarantee this is something we are going to hear more and more. We already hear it about those who refuse to wear masks or accept Covid-19 as the Black Death of our day. Trump supporters are being told it after the recent election, despite widespread evidence that fraud was indeed a factor in the Democrats' victory. No doubt when Brexit turns out to be not Brexit after all we will be told it again. When the coronavirus vaccine becomes widely available those who are reluctant to take it, for very good reasons - why accept an improperly tested vaccine for a largely non-fatal illness?- will be told they are being unreasonable.

If you haven't learnt by now that evil's modus operandi is to start small and then incrementally ramp things up until you are doing and believing things you never would have dreamed of doing or believing 10, 20, 30 years ago, then you really have not being paying attention. If you haven't realised that the coronavirus is being used as an excuse to dismantle long-cherished but now taken for granted freedoms from a largely supine population then you are asleep. This is all fundamentally a spiritual assault but even those who have no spiritual concerns should be able to see what is going on, and be deeply concerned about it. Human beings are being herded into pens, ideological pens and even, what with the lockdowns, physical pens. The most likely to be able to resist this, white males, are the ones who are being most denigrated so that their powers of resistance are diminished. This notwithstanding the fact that it is also white males in large part who stand behind the creeping totalitarianism.

There will be plenty of excuses for those who do not want to see the truth or who are too lazy to stand up against it. The lockdowns, the masks, the vaccinations are all there to protect us. This is a lie. They are there to control us. Of course, the need for them is dressed up so as to appear beneficial to human beings, and it can be hard to prove that there is no need for them. But it is not hard to see this if you bother to look with clarity. This is one of those cases where arguments can be made on both sides but those who are in any way aware of spiritual realities know what is going on. Arguments are really a waste of time in this case, even if it is good to have them at one's disposal. It is not arguments that will convince most people. It is intuitive realisation. What is required above all today is the power of discernment. This is a spiritual survival tool that everyone must develop and the way to develop it is to learn to look up, beyond this world and to the real source of the good. Not ideological good as the modern world prizes but actual good.

Therefore I say to everyone who reads this that it is time to be unreasonable. Because now to be unreasonable in the eyes of the world is to be reasonable in the eyes of God. The two positions do not always conflict with each other but they often do and they certainly do now. Don't be swayed by the smooth words you hear to justify the loss of freedoms. However plausibly dressed up the excuses for this are, they are lies. Don't be afraid of seeming unreasonable. Don't be deliberately contrary or picture yourself as some kind of freedom fighter for truth. That is also a trap, designed to push you into egotism if you do not fall into compliance. But hold fast against worldly arguments while being centred in the truth of God, dedicating yourself to his service in love and humility. Then all will be well.

The Meaning of Religion

I'm probably being very foolish in trying to define something as deep and wide as religion but the question arose when I asked myself what we most lack today. We don't lack morality of a sort, meaning a morality based on totally materialistic considerations, but morality does not lie at the heart of what religion is. In fact, I would say that a highly moral atheist is a worse person, worse in the sense of further away from truth and real goodness, than a sincere believer who, despite his belief, sins and who might even be a bad person in the eyes of the world.

This is because the believer has something the atheist lacks which is not belief as such but openness to transcendence. It is this that lies at the heart of any proper religion or religious attitude. I say it is not belief as such because you can believe anything. In a way what you believe is of secondary importance. What truly matters and what defines real religion is this inner openness, this sensitivity to a higher reality. Of course, this by itself is nowhere near enough and it can be deformed by the way we react to it, by the mental interpretation (belief) we put on it. But without a sense of transcendent reality (an open spirit is more important than an open mind), no man or woman can be called religious.

So, the essence of religion is not morality and it is not belief. These are important and necessary adjuncts but without spiritual sensitivity they are nothing. Spiritual sensitivity needs to be worked on and developed but it is the foundation of religion, and if it is missing the individual in whom it is missing, be he ever so good as the world defines good, clean-living, moral, a giver of charity and all the rest of it, lives in spiritual darkness and will not be saved which means released into heaven after death. If you do not in a certain sense live in heaven now, if your mind does not already tend towards it and if you are not inwardly yearning for it, you will not find it later. If your heart reaches up to heaven, notwithstanding that your behaviour might fall well short of what is required, then you are saved. You will have work to do but you are facing towards the light. It is this idea that lies behind the doctrine that mere belief in Jesus saves. It is not the intellectual belief that saves for it surely does not. It is spiritual receptivity, openness to the divine. That is the only true belief, and this is what lies at the root of all true religion.

The Descent of Man

This is the time of the inversion of values when everything is turned upside down so that top becomes bottom and bottom top. We call this progress because we have lost all connection to spirit and transcendent reality but, in fact, it is nothing more than the collapse of being to the plane of matter which, without spirit, becomes chaos as in unqualified formlessness. It can never quite reach that state because spirit exists whether we believe in it or not but it can approach it and, the less we do acknowledge transcendence, the closer we will approach it. Virtually everything the modern world is based on comes from the rejection of spirit.

The descent from spirit to matter is recognised in traditional teachings on the four ages, ages which descend from Gold to Silver to Bronze to Iron. The Golden Age is fully open to spirit. This was the world now only known to us in myth when gods walked the Earth and civilisation and culture were based on reconstructing the pattern of the heavens. Authority was with sacred leaders who were in touch with the higher worlds and transmitted the sense of those worlds to the populace who themselves instinctively responded to the reality of spirit.

The law of entropy applies to cycles of human existence as it does to everything in the material world. As time passed consciousness became more constricted and the material world more present. Leadership passed to the second caste, a warrior aristocracy of kings and nobles. There was still a strong sense of the spiritual but the affairs of this world began to assume a greater prominence. This, by the way, only applies to more advanced sections of humanity who were able to form coherent civilisations. Primitive people, unfashionable as it may be to say that there were such, existed in the typical primitive state of closeness to the earth, generally speaking unable to separate themselves from nature.

At this point we should say that in one sense the whole of historical time is part of the Iron Age when matter is the main focus of conscious awareness and spirit has fallen from its rightful pole position. But there are cycles within cycles, patterns are repeated on higher and lower levels, and the descent from Gold to Iron is repeated even within the Iron Age itself as it is within all authentic human civilisations.

The descent to the third phase comes when aristocracies degenerate, losing touch with their core virtues such as honour, chivalry, loyalty and responsibility for those over whom they stand. Power now shifts to money and those who trade, the merchant or, in modern terms, the banker and the industrialist. The economy is of central concern and higher values begin to be lost and replaced by utilitarian ones, appropriate to the material plane on which attention is now concentrated, thrift, industriousness and practicality. Equivalent vices come into play too. But then there comes a further descent and power begins to shift to what was traditionally regarded as the lowest caste, what we today call the people or the masses. Simply by virtue of numbers they start to become of significance. We have entered the age of quantity in which matter assumes the rights of spirit with the consequent inevitable loss of all higher values relating to truth, goodness, beauty etc. This is clearly the age we are now in though it must be recognised that there is always considerable overlap between ages.  We might regard this new phase as starting around the time of the French Revolution, given a large boost with the Russian Revolution and now spreading throughout the West. Even if the masses do not yet have actual political power, as the merchant class still holds onto that in most places, they can influence it enormously, and they undoubtedly have cultural power due to their increased financial power and also the fact that materialism is the default belief system even among many religious people who effectively relegate their religion to a subset of an overall material world view. The current dogma of egalitarianism is a tell tale sign of the descent of power to the mass population.

We can see the decay of spiritual influence in every area of human life as would naturally be the case since it is a universal phenomenon that primarily affects consciousness though the psychic and physical environments also coarsen. Art which started off as sacred then became 'high' and is now more or less just popular is a particularly obvious example but you can see the descent everywhere. Nothing is exempt, including, and in some ways especially, religion.

I don't reject Darwin's theory of evolution as a partial explanation of how animal forms developed but it is very one-sided. Unlike the two other apostles of modernism with whom he is sometimes bracketed, namely Marx and Freud, he was clearly a serious scientist engaged in serious work which could have brought about, if regarded as applying only to certain aspects of the creative/evolutionary process, a real advance in understanding. But unfortunately it was taken as a complete description of how life developed and grew. It has become the creation myth of the materialist and the extraordinary harm it has done is seldom recognised. For what it did was to reduce Man to a creature that ascended from the mud instead of descending from the stars, and it is used as a justification for all the spiritual degradation we see today. If we are solely material, only material values matter. We are all equal, all equally nothing. 

But the attempt to establish equality, believe it or not, and most people won't believe it, is actually a gross spiritual error. What was the first attempt in this vein? It was Satan's attempt to be equal to God. He then encouraged Adam and Eve to do the same thing. Myth, you say? Perhaps, but myth is putting inner truths into story form. Equality is not a Christian virtue. Certainly God loves all his children and they all have their rightful place in the hierarchy of being, one that no other can fill, if they follow the correct path. But the created world is precisely based on this hierarchy of being which provides it with all its extraordinary richness. In terms of creation movement into the spiritual requires increased differentiation, differentiation in overall oneness, yes, but each created being must realise his or her full individuality to be an authentic soul. Pure oneness or equality is sameness and can only exist in a non-manifested state or that of formless matter which is the direction we are currently headed as all spiritual order and structure break down. Those who wish to break free of this downward pull must recognise it for what it is or they will be pulled down with it.

Freedom and Slavery

Nobody can have any real idea as to what is going on in the world today who doesn't acknowledge the supernatural element. That is why people make the wrong choice over and over again now. But once you do, and you realise that we are seeing the outward manifestation of a spiritual battle in which the prize is human souls, many things fall into place.

The two great bastions of freedom in the world were England and America which explains why so much work has been put into attempting to destroy them. If the desired end of a global totalitarianism is to be be achieved, one which has an ultimately spiritual goal of enslaving souls, all obstacles must be removed. This is also the reason the white male is so attacked nowadays. He is the most likely to resist the destruction of freedom.

Freedom is the fundamental spiritual quality. It is more fundamental even than love since love depends on the reality of freedom to exist in the first place. Machines cannot love. Slaves cannot love. I am not talking about physical slavery which is the least of slaveries but spiritual slaves in which the mind and even the soul are possessed. Now, this can only happen if you let it happen but outer conditions are being manipulated into creating the best environment for it to happen. Freedom can be found at any moment in even the most extreme cases by turning to God but how many people actually want to do that?

All around the world today we see forces engaged in the destruction of freedom. The Covid-19 lockdowns where you are obliged to stay in your house and wear a covering on your face when you go out, the climate change agenda which seeks to curtail freedom and choice and exercise rigid control, environmentalism (or what it has become since being hijacked by leftism) which values Nature over Humanity (and Nature seen not as God's creation but a kind of unconscious earth goddess), the anti-racism movement which wants to colonise the mind with a lie so that quality is expunged and mediocrity encouraged. Political correctness in general. 

Without a strong religious revival nothing can be done to stop the drift leftwards away from freedom and into control. Nothing except religious faith will be strong enough to withstand this drift which is becoming more of a torrent. I maintain that no leftist really believes in God. Left-wing people may think or claim they believe in God but they don't because, if you do, that belief overwhelms everything else, and leftism is the belief in Man. It is the religion of Man in which he worships himself in the abstract. Humanity as 'it'. The leftist virtues are niceness and tolerance, but these are virtues of materialists for they are directed at the transitory mortal man not the spiritual soul. Indeed, they deny the soul and, unless superseded by a love of the true good, will lead to spiritual death. Satan loves niceness and tolerance because they give him the same rights as God.*

This is the story of the world today and tomorrow. Unless we see our origin and destination as beyond this world we risk being trapped in matter even after we die. Matter is unfree but in this world it is illumined by spirit and we have the chance to break out of it. We are here to be given the chance to ascend to spirit.  If we reject that chance through the simple act of denial we condemn ourselves to darkness. For how long, I don't know. God is merciful but he has also given us the power to choose and he cannot take that back even to save us from the wrong choice.

*Added note: Niceness and tolerance maintain and support the earthly human as earthly human rather than seeing that as the outermost part of a spiritual soul needing to grow into divine awareness. They, and this reaches to the core of the profound spiritual error of the left, treat men and women as quantitative units rather than individual souls. Naturally, one is not saying that niceness and tolerance are bad things in themselves but they are not primary and, if made so, they become bad things, especially when used to dismantle the reality of spiritual authority and hierarchy. For reality and truth are not democratic. 

Good and Evil

 Does this make sense? 

The strong antipathy and disgust that good has for evil comes from a love of the good. The hatred that evil has for good comes from resentment, pride, fear and the desire to bring down and destroy. Two emotions that may, on the face of it, seem similar but which come from very different sources.

Soul or Body. Which Comes First?

Here are some thoughts on body and soul.

The materialist believes the soul is the expression of the body. But the body cannot be free, being the product of arbitrary material forces that have temporarily come together to give the appearance of something real. Neither then the soul be free, and when these material forces fall apart, the apparently real person they have formed falls apart too and nothing is left of him except his constituent parts which are scattered to the four winds.

If the materialist is right it means that love, beauty and goodness do not exist except as hallucinations of the mind. You and I do not exist except as illusionary concepts with no substance. So nothing matters.

The religious person believes the body is the expression of the soul. The soul is free, a creation of God who gives it his own life and freedom. Therefore, its sense of individuality is real. It has a purpose and it is on a journey towards something that will, if the path is trodden correctly, bring it to glory. 

If the religious person is right everything matters. There is such a thing as truth and if we do not conform to it that will be to our great loss.

Modern belief denies the soul but pretends there can be meaning and truth and goodness without it. This is totally contradictory. If there is no soul, there is nothing. To go through life, we must practice constant self-deception until we cease to be.

But if there is a soul we must live according to that truth which means reorient ourselves to that reality, and this requires a complete turnabout in our attitude to life and ourselves.

Reality or non-reality. That is our choice. There is nothing in between.

Spiritual life or death. To be free or to be a slave. The choice between these two extremes is being made more clear in every aspect of our lives. When we deny freedom, we choose death

Added note: Apart from its spiritual sense this post is also a comment on wider political events. There is an ongoing battle between forces of freedom and totalitarianism, between that which favours the individual and that which subordinates the individual to the dictates of a globalist technocracy. This reflects the fundamental view of which comes first, soul or body.

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.

The State of Sin and the State of Grace

Sometimes a person who takes religion seriously and understands what it actually means in terms of belief and behaviour can be accused of being insensitive to the suffering of human beings in this world. But it is a spiritual trap that one can be diverted from a proper focus on God and the soul to an over-concern with mortal man and his preoccupations. That doesn't mean we should ignore mortal man but it is a question of priorities, and often to concentrate on what is good for mortal man means one does harm to him in his spiritual being because, while the two are certainly part of one whole, there is a hierarchical relationship between the different aspects of our nature, to ignore which is to sever communication between the higher and the lower.

Think of it like this. Human beings can exist in two states; the state of sin and the state of grace. The first can be compared to our normal earthly self. It is material man, that which we appear to be in an earthly context. Our everyday physical, emotional and intellectual self. We can continue in this state of a material being all our lives, and we will do unless we wake up to a deeper reality. Then we understand that our purpose is to become aware of and grow into the spiritual. What use is it doing everything we can, on an individual or political level, to make the material man happy and fulfilled (or seemingly happy and fulfilled) if he represents a false and fallen state? But this is what we do. Material man is not what we are, certainly not what we should be. In fact, all politics, all education, should be focussed on nurturing the spiritual, bringing that to the forefront of our consciousness and awakening us to the reality of our souls. This should not just be left to religion. It must encompass every aspect of our lives and be behind all else as it often was in traditional societies. That is something we have forgotten to our great detriment.

The trap I mentioned earlier is one that left-wing ideologues have fallen into and fallen deeply. Their belief system inevitably causes its partisans to regard human beings as material rather than spiritual beings, and this is why leftist ideas are invariably bad on a deeper level even when they may seem superficially or even naturally good. The spiritual harm that eventuates as that level is denied or reduced in import more than outweighs any putative material or humanitarian good. 

It might be countered that right wing ideas are also materialistic if they support and encourage greed and selfishness as certain forms of capitalism are said to do, and they are so in a worse way than those of the left which, at least, aim to eliminate material unfairness. This, at any rate, is a typical argument. It is perfectly true that the right without God is materialistic but the point is that the right with God sees man as a spiritual being above all while the left, even when it accepts some kind of spirituality, still puts its focus on the material and the worldly human. The spiritual is subsidiary to the material for the left, always. This may be denied but is actually the essence of leftism which is based on a levelling down and destruction of quality. A little drop of leftism will always contaminate anything else it is mixed with and reduce the whole, whatever other ingredients there might be, to materialism.

Is the task to make us happy in our state of sin, as material beings? Or is it to raise us up to the state of grace, enabling us to acquire full self-knowledge as spiritual beings? Don't ever interpret the spiritual in the light of the material as the left inevitably does. See it in its own light and see everything else in that light too.

Be Prepared

In the coming years as the world descends more deeply into the grip of atheistic materialism and (probably) some form of totalitarianism, we can react in two ways. We can either withdraw completely from the world to focus on our personal relationship with God.  Get our own spiritual house in order and leave the outer world to itself. Or we can engage and speak out against the spiritual desecration of the world and of human beings by adding our voice to those that attempt to provide some light in the darkness for individuals who may be seeking it but who cannot find guidance in a world of inverted values.

Whatever we do will depend on personal temperament and mission. Don't be put off by the word mission. Many of us come to this world with a task to perform and that may be great or small but, whatever it is, is still our task. What we are meant to do.

It is of course possible to do both, and I would say we should do both though the proportion of inner to outer activity will vary, and do so at different times. I personally spent 21 years leading a more or less contemplative kind of existence during which I paid very little attention to the world. Then circumstances changed and I was thrown back into the world. I stopped meditating and started to engage much more with outer reality. I acquired duties and responsibilities. I paid more attention to what was transpiring in terms of how the world was being actively corrupted whereas previously I was focussed only on inner things. But even when I wrote my first book in around 2010 I was still largely only concerned with spirituality in a pure sense, and, from my perspective then, the world just had to get along as best it could.

But sometimes you have to come down from the mountaintops. I would still say the spiritual is really the only thing that matters but the difference now is that the world has moved on to the point at which ordinary life is not just not spiritual. It has become actively anti-spiritual. I would put it like this. In the past, God and Caesar occupied different realms and Caesar kept to his own realm. However, now he has invaded God's realm and started to assume spiritual (actually of course anti-spiritual) rights. We must effectively worship him. His values are not just values relating to this world but absolute values that are supposed to reach into the mind and conscience. He claims the right to define goodness and truth. This is not a sudden change. It has been coming on for several decades but now a tipping point has been reached, and if you want to be true to spiritual values you cannot just ignore the world in a passive sense and get on with your life, unpestered. You have to actively reject the world. 

When was the last time this happened? It was probably the time of the early Christians when people were required to acknowledge Caesar as a god and worship him even if that only meant burning a bit of incense before an image. It would have been easy to do this and no doubt many did, telling themselves it was only a meaningless gesture that kept the authorities happy and they could then get on with their life undisturbed. But others realised that to do this would be to cross a threshold. Gesture or not, it was effectively accepting the primacy of this world over God. Once you have done that, it becomes harder and harder to keep God at the forefront of your life. One little gesture so easily leads to complete capitulation.

The contemplative might think that it doesn't really matter what he does outwardly, and sometimes it doesn't. But sometimes it does, and to accept an evil thing puts you on the side of evil. If you really have no choice, that is different but if you do have a choice you can make the right one or the wrong one.

I expect the time is coming when we will have to make that choice. Signs are in the air but the time is not yet. This is more a rehearsal, I would say. A rehearsal and a tilling of the soil. It is a preparation but we too should, in the immortal words of Robert Baden-Powell, "Be prepared".

We are in a Spiritual War

It is obvious that we live in very dangerous times. Clearly, I am not referring to Covid-19 which I assume all readers of this blog realise is just a more or less conventional virus that is being used as a means to an end, that end being control and dominance. The virus is really the least of our worries. It will kill off some elderly people just as flu and pneumonia regularly do but it will not do much harm to the great majority. By all means, we should protect the vulnerable but it should be apparent to anyone by now who bothers to look beyond the official propaganda that our reaction has been totally disproportionate to the threat. Whether that is because of fear and panic or politicians, administrators and other figures of the establishment wanting to hold onto power or even something deliberate and planned is another matter. Whatever the cause of it all, the reality is that we have been deceived into giving up freedom.

The real danger is spiritual and this, I fear, is only the beginning. The groundwork has been carefully laid over the last few decades, centuries even. We have been gradually led away from the knowledge that our life is centred in God to a worldview which is totally materialistic and atheistic. This to the extent that even many people who think they are spiritual or religious still adapt most of their thinking to the materialistic ethos. I am not always exempt from this myself. It's the water in which we swim and it can be difficult to throw it off completely. But look at Christ and the prophets of old. They did not compromise with the worldly powers and worldly wisdom one iota. They grounded themselves totally in spiritual knowledge without any concession to the world. We too must do this. There can be no compromise with lies, even lies plausibly dressed up to look like partial truths. Why bother with partial truths when you have the truth? They are usually just means to smuggle in the lie anyway.

I say the danger is spiritual. What I mean by this is that we will be asked to give up more and more of our personal integrity. Our right to believe what we wish to believe, do what want to do, independent of any external authority. We will be made, through fear, desire for favour or money, to adopt a certain way of being. Many people are rightly concerned about the possibility of being obliged to accept a vaccination if they wish to lead a normal life. If this ever really does come about we will know that a line has been crossed and that freedom really has been lost. At the moment, that does seem to be the way things are heading but the more people who are alert to the dangers of spiritual slavery, the more difficult it will be for the powers that be to enforce their evil agenda. I use that word because that is what it is. Evil is that which seeks to control and dominate for its own benefit. It seeks to deny free will. It seeks to enslave. Evil is a spiritual reality that the modern world does not recognise but that just means that ordinary individuals, never mind the corrupt egotists and degenerate psychopaths who rule us, are more susceptible to it.

Jesus said when speaking about the End Times that, "except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved". This sounds grim. It implies that evil will grow so powerful in its scope that resistance becomes well-nigh impossible. But then he went on to say that, "for the elect's sake, those days shall be shortened".  So we must be prepared for things to get very bad but, at the same time, know that the eventual outcome is not in doubt. For those who remain steadfast and centred in God, victory is assured. This is spiritual victory, not necessarily to be known in this world, as it wasn't for Jesus himself, but it will be real and lasting victory.

The two qualities most important right now are courage and honesty. I am assuming a spiritual orientation. If you don't have, or don't soon acquire, that you will be completely at the mercy of the worldly powers. But even with a spiritual orientation you must have the courage to confront the evil that is being more clearly revealed with every week that passes. And you must be honest because in a world of lies all that can save us is the truth. These two qualities, it will be remarked, are those of the martyr and it seems very probable that in the days to come we will all be examined to see what stuff we are made of.  This should not be a frightening thought. It is actually a privilege to be alive at such a time. We are called to be soldiers in God's army. This army has to fight but it is a spiritual fight and the weapons must be the spiritual weapons of love and truth. However, don't be deceived by how the enemy has tried to disarm that first weapon by reducing it from something brave, bold and fiery to a bland universal acceptance of everything, good or bad, on its own terms. The highest love is the love of the good, the beautiful and the true, and this love will not stand by when these things are attacked. 

Bruce Charlton's Litmus Test

Bruce Charlton has come up with a Litmus Test to determine what side a person is on in the current spiritual war. The test has three parts which comprise how you respond to the coronavirus scare, the anti-racism propaganda and the man-made climate change agenda. To accept these at face value as they are presented by official channels and the mainstream media indicates you are following the powers of this world rather than God. And it doesn't matter if you think you are religious or spiritual. Those are just words if they are not backed up with proper insight into the nature of reality.

This test is interesting because it is doing something more than simply seeing whether you go along with the idea that these three things are true in the way they are presented. It goes more deeply than whether the coronavirus is as serious as claimed or whether some ethnic groups have been treated better or worse than others, for whatever reasons, or whether the climate is hotting up as a result of human activity. There will be factors that seem to support the current official lines in all of these cases but there will also be factors that contradict these approved lines. For the layman it can be difficult to establish certainty one way or the other, and it is also difficult to argue effectively for the contrary position in the face of so much ideological pressure and unrelenting one-sided propaganda.

However, there is a greater point beyond whether any of these things actually have any truth in them or not or whether there is some truth but we are presented with a very one-sided picture. The real point is that the remedies proposed for these supposed material evils are Trojan horses which are used to bring about profound spiritual evils. This is what really matters and what a person of spiritual discernment should able to see. The evils of the virus, of racism and of climate change (real or unreal) are as nothing besides the evils of the proposed solutions to them. Shall I define these evils? Outwardly, it's a simple matter of totalitarianism and humanity reduced to controlled servitude. Inwardly, it is the closing tight shut of the door to spiritual freedom and truth. It is the absolute enforcement of materialism. 

If you care about freedom and truth and beauty and real goodness you are now on a collision course with the worldly powers. You can no longer be a passively good, decent, nice sort of person because if you are you will sooner or later be sucked into what is a kind of de facto Satanism. I realise that might seem a shocking thing to say but the reality is, or is becoming, that if you don't actively stand for God then you are against him, and there is, or soon will be, no neutral ground.