Proof of God

The human mind is possibly the only thing in existence that lives separated from reality. Everything below the human state, below here meaning of more restricted consciousness, is embedded in the wholeness of life, more specifically natural life with its priorities of self-preservation and reproduction. Everything above the human state, such as angels and those human beings who have entered the kingdom of God, has become one with spiritual reality. There are also demons but these are a fallen not a natural category. It is only human beings who, by virtue of what they are, live outside reality. This is because human beings have moved beyond necessity into freedom but are not yet so far beyond necessity that they are fully free. They have developed a conscious self but are still bound to that because they have not yet aligned that self with the greater whole. 

The human state is in many ways a sad state but it is one full of potential. It is sad because of the separation from the rest of life a conscious self causes with the inevitable consequence of suffering. Alienation is the hallmark of a human being, especially one that has progressed to the midway point we now occupy in which we have largely overcome pure instinct to live in a rational state but have not yet developed the intuition that would start us on the path of return to God. This is midway on the path of spiritual evolution but it is also the nadir of an arc, the point from which we have to ascend by turning to spiritual life. If we fail to do that, as so many of us are currently failing to do, we will fall still further into spiritual darkness.

It is only the human being who requires proof of God because it is only the human being that lives outside God, separated from him. The animal is unconsciously one with God, the saint consciously so. But all we know is our self, our own consciousness, limited in content and with a seemingly impenetrable barrier between it and everything else. And yet while our consciousness certainly is limited  it is also self-conscious and in that fact is the source of freedom, love and potentially inexhaustible creativity. It is, in other words, god-like even if it is so in a very undeveloped form. 

Do you want proof of God? The fact that you are a living, conscious being, no mere automaton, is proof that God is. He is in you. Not only in you, of course, but he is there, manifesting in your consciousness. You, you yourself, are proof of God.

Technocracy is the Perfection of Materialism

The events of the last 12 months have made obvious something that has been gradually taking place over many years. The world is on the way to being ruled by a system of technocracy. Politics and politicians play their part but they are increasingly just enacting the will of a group of technical specialists and experts working to impose control over the populace. In their own minds and according to their own beliefs, these people may be well-motivated and working for the good of humanity but that is because their vision of life is severely limited. They are completely materialistic, regarding human beings as things to be worked on. Certainly, to be brought to an optimum level of efficiency, at once intellectual, emotional and moral, and made collectively happy with suffering, both physical and mental, reduced to a minimum but ultimately little more than machines which need effective servicing to run smoothly. In this scenario, the individual is of diminished importance, personal freedom is allowed only to the extent that it doesn't interfere with the overall programme and the spiritual is completely denied except insofar as a pseudo-spiritual might be included as a psychological palliative. 

It is computers that have made this possible. There are grounds for saying that computers are one of the greatest disasters to have befallen human beings since we got thrown out of Eden. So seductive that we have all succumbed to them but actually separating us from the soul more than we ever have been because in many ways they parody true spiritual consciousness. Indeed, computers can be regarded as a material perversion of the spiritual in that they externalise (on a lower level and in a degraded fashion) some of the qualities of the soul thus disincentivising us to seek the higher reality. But they have also laid bare the myth that technology in itself is neutral. Technology is far from neutral for our minds tend to adopt the form of the technology we use. We are starting to think like computers and in terms of computer technology and in so doing we create a barrier between our minds and higher domains of spiritual freedom and intuition.

Technocracy is anti-God because it is materialistic, atheistic, seeks complete control, subordinates truth to the expedient and the efficient, denies the primacy of the good, the beautiful and the true and puts power in the hands of an unaccountable few whose expertise in specialised areas blinds them to the overall picture. But for the technocratic type of mind theirs is the best way to organise society because this mind is oblivious to what lies beyond the quantitative level.

In a world controlled by data and spreadsheets there is no room for beauty, mystery, sacrifice or love. It is a world run by algorithms in which neither freedom nor the real good can find expression, good now being defined as that which makes the system run more efficiently. Human beings are viewed in terms of their material selves only, and this in a far more complete way than any of our previous political systems which were a hodge-podge of the natural human and materialistic ways of thinking. Technocracy is materialism brought to full power and complete dominance. It is the logical conclusion of materialism hence its appeal to materialistic minds. There is no space for anything outside a closed system. Inevitably any technocracy will collapse in the long run because there cannot be a closed system. Truth must eventually interpose. However, tremendous damage can be done to the soul before this position is reached. 

If hell can be defined as a place closed to divine influence then the ideal technocratic society is a reasonable image of of one kind of hell, the kind run by measurement and numbers in which the soul is a known quantity. And this is what we are in the process of constructing. It's what the events of the last 12 months have brought closer. Do you want your soul to be just a statistic on a computer?

God and Evil

God can make good come out of evil but this does not in any way justify evil. It simply means that God is God. Evil is anti-God and because God is truth and reality, and evil is anti-truth and anti-reality, God always stands above and beyond evil which only exists as opposition to God. He comes first. It can only be because he already is.

The present descent into spiritual evil and materialism is not wished by God but he can use it to bring souls back to him and so create something positive out of the negative. As the world turns to sin and death, and that is what it is doing by its rejection of the transcendent, many souls may be forced to wake up. What they could not see in normal times when life made sense they will be able to see in times of increasing absurdity. When the results of our current attitudes and behaviour become manifest, when the inevitable insanities of our beliefs take concrete form as these beliefs reach their logical conclusions, then people may begin to see more clearly and realise what they have done, that they have followed lies.

2020 was the start of a new phase in the attempt to separate man from his true self in God. First, religion was attacked and what remained of it hollowed out. Then, as atheism and materialism spread, the natural order of creation was undermined. This motivation, whether they know it or not, is what lies behind the anti-sexist and anti-racist fanatics. Now, when most human beings have no anchoring in anything beyond this world and little sense of objective reality, our integrity as individuals with power over our own lives is being removed. If things continue as they have begun we will be reduced to vassals of the state or, better put because even the idea of a state will be removed, the System, an overarching totalitarian bureaucracy run by one-dimensional specialists and experts on wholly materialistic lines. Shallow, hollow men and women who can analyse data and who may possess a certain amount of brain power along technical/mechanistic lines but who have no vision or depth. You see them in positions of prominence now.

This will lead to great spiritual evil but the bright side is that the very inhumanity of this System may force people to wake up. The System is bad and those who run it are bad people. Let's not mince words. No doubt they are well-meaning in their spiritually shrivelled up ways and no doubt they behave impeccably according to their own sterile beliefs, but they have gone bad in the soul. They have turned away from and rejected the light. However, the world they make will be a dead world and that very fact may make people search for the true source of life and turn to God.

What is the Holy Spirit?

The Holy Spirit has always been the most mysterious of the three persons of the Trinity. The Father and the Son are relatively simple to understand, on a basic level at least. God is God, the Creator and Father of all, and the Son is Jesus the incarnated God and Saviour, but the Holy Spirit is not something that is so easily defined or which can be pinned down in any clear way. Part of the reason for that is that the time of the Holy Spirit has not yet fully arrived except for a few individuals here and there. Awareness of the Holy Spirit is something humanity needs to evolve towards because it is not out there but in here.

God is transcendent and he is immanent too. The Holy Spirit is God Immanent. It is God within us and one might go so far as to say that for a perfected soul it is us though with the proviso that this does not entail an absorption into pure oneness and loss of self. But the spiritual goal might be defined as reaching a state of complete union with the Holy Spirit which means bringing one's individual nature into complete alignment with God as he is within our own soul.

The Holy Spirit is God as known subjectively. It is intuitive knowledge, spiritual love and total freedom. As such it is the opposite to outer authority whether that be religious, political or that based on any earthly image of God (most religions end up, however they start, as serving an image of God). But until we are in the position of being able to respond correctly to the Holy Spirit, through personal spiritual development gained through self-purification, cultivation of imagination and increased spiritual sensitivity, alignment of personal will with the will of God meaning his purpose in creation, then we may need the guidance of authority. 

The usual cautionary notes apply both with authority and with inner understanding. Authority must be both legitimate and uncorrupted as far as is feasible. Now, for instance, it is neither. And inner understanding must also be legitimate and uncorrupted meaning not contaminated by ego, prejudice and opinion. This is a hard task but achieving it is part of the spiritual path, the part that makes authority our own though, of course, it is not our personal possession. We have just brought our soul to the point at which it can be filled with the Holy Spirit, and the authority is that of the Holy Spirit.

In the modern world outer authority is dead. There is none legitimate but that is a necessary phase required so that we may build our own inner authority. Increasingly, we will find that we have to build a spiritual understanding and awareness quite independently of any outer structures, in fact often going against these outer structures. This must always be done with humility but also with strength and determination. You will not build spiritual truth into the fabric of your being if you do not learn how to stand against the world. So, have confidence in yourself but also submit yourself to God at all times remembering it is never you who achieves these things but God in you which is the Holy Spirit.

I don't wish to be reductive and say this is all the Holy Spirit is but from the point of view of our immediate needs this is exactly what it is. The Father and the Son are beyond us but the Holy Spirit is within us. However, remember these three are one. That is a mystery which cannot be solved by the intellectual mind but with the aid of the Holy Spirit we can come closer to an understanding of what it means.

The Natural and the Spiritual

Human beings are a mixture of the natural and the spiritual, part animal and part angel, and therein lies many of our problems but also our shot at glory. We have the potential to rise to the angel or fall to the animal or below since a corrupted angel has sunk far beneath the natural state. Misused freedom and a misaligned will can make a man the lowest form of life there is from a spiritual perspective.

As part of our being derives from natural earthly processes, worked out over countless millennia, it is quite possible that many of the ideas we hold, political, cultural and so on, which might seem to be reasonably worked out or entertained and that we think we have arrived at by our own devices are actually just rationalisations of instincts based on our evolutionary past. Competition and dominance obviously, but even empathy and sharing as we experience them will be rooted in the natural not the spiritual. They could derive from tactics evolved by the human animal to deal with environmental pressures in the distant past and so may even be said to be genetic in origin. 

This means that whether you are a nice or nasty person, judging by the standards of modern society, may simply in many cases be a matter of your genes. If that is right and the form your character takes, to a certain extent (for we cannot push this too far but let's call it your type of character), is something that derives from an instinctual level then where does spirituality come in? I've often heard people say of someone who might have a forceful personality that this person is 'not very spiritual' but this is defining the spiritual by the secular and just means he may not be very congenial or go along with the sentimentalities of the day. Spirituality is not niceness or even kindness. It may include these, especially the latter, but it goes far beyond them because it relates to an attitude towards the transcendent. These qualities of niceness and even kindness are largely just social and do not have much to do with real spiritual values at all.

We live in this world in a body and with a brain determined by our genes. It is primarily this that produces the sort of person we may be though the spiritual self is also a factor especially in what I will call the more evolved person. The test we undergo while in this world is to examine whether we are worthy of conscious spiritual life and this involves us stepping out of natural life, which includes social life and intellectual life, into a God-centred existence.

This doesn't mean it doesn't matter how you behave. It surely does but the primary consideration is the spiritual orientation of the heart. This is what goes beyond the natural, good or bad, to a higher perception of reality. To be spiritual does not mean to be a good person in worldly terms. It means to have the heart open to the transcendent and to orient yourself around that. 

Because the potential to be misunderstood in this matter is great, I repeat that this is no excuse for bad behaviour. Indeed, if your heart really is correctly oriented this will obviously effect the way you interact with the world and with others. But it does mean that spirituality is not measured by a worldly yardstick. The great commandment is to love God and everything else follows or does not follow from that.

Argument and Debate are now a Waste of Time

I no longer have any interest in discussing anything to do with the world with people who are not at least open to the fact that we are in the midst of a spiritual war and that the battle is over souls. I am not interested in looking at political or cultural factors. There may well be such but they are only symptoms of the underlying spiritual malaise and to address them without addressing that is a distraction and a waste of time. It is obvious that socialism only arises when a civilisation enters its decadent phase. It is obvious that art and culture have been working against real truth and beauty for well over a century. It is obvious that most science follows the funding. It is obvious that feminism is destructive to higher values and a healthy relationship between men and women. It is obvious that when, as egalitarian ideology does, you prioritise quantity over quality, culture collapses. If you don't see these things by now you are wilfully blind. There is no point in arguing about such matters.

For a long time I tried to speak to people about spiritual things from within the context of worldly things by which I mean while not overtly rejecting all progressive secular doctrine or else by trying to find some justification for it in that the past was clearly far from perfect and injustices needed addressing. I tried to build a bridge between the spiritual and the secular when I spoke to anyone who might be interested in what I thought (which was not many people!). I started off not doing this but was called extreme and intolerant in my attitude which perhaps I was. So I moderated my words so as not to frighten the horses and tried to fit the spiritual talk into something of a modernist ethos though always with the spiritual as over-riding everything. But that was a mistake. You cannot compromise with the world. If you do, you just dilute the spiritual and it ends up as subordinate to the secular. So you must reject the secular in toto. That is more apparent than ever now when the results of compromise are clearly to be seen. Officially, the spiritual is dead and gone. It exists as a museum artefact of no real relevance, something that some people still pay a token tribute to but which signifies nothing really meaningful to them.

The situation is now so far gone that we cannot compromise with the world in any way. The world has become evil and those who don't recognise that and don't separate themselves from it will be dragged down with it. Nice, decent, kind people will be dragged down if they don't wake up to the truth. Their niceness, their decency, their kindness will then be known for what they are which is spiritual evasion and irresponsibility. Spiritual cowardice, in fact.

It's time to see things for what they are. Yes, we have come to the dying phases of Western civilisation. The traditional pattern has been followed in which people have struggled to create something and then what they have created results in a material abundance in which degeneration sets in. But this time there is something more. People can point to parallels with ancient civilisations and their decline and these parallels certainly exist. Some of them I mentioned earlier. But the spiritual darkness is greater now. We rose higher in a material sense and and have fallen more spiritually. This is a time of gathering in of souls. A final testing to see which ones have truth in them in a time of lies and which ones stick with the lies for personal advantage or ease or laziness or spiritual rottenness. It is a time of judgement. It is not just we who are being judged but we are being tested to see if we ourselves can judge with righteous judgement,  judge between good and evil and between spiritual good and material well-being.

We now live in a world of lies, one that has got progressively worse over the last 100 years with each generation seeking greater material self-satisfaction and rejecting the wisdom of its ancestors. But we cannot blame the world if we succumb to it. We all have spiritual truth within us if we will listen to it but then we have to close down the greedy little self that always wants feeding. That self is not killed but lifted up beyond itself by love of the real good, beautiful and true which ultimately only have any meaning when centred in God. Today the battle lines are being clearly marked out and there is no discussion to be had with those who reject God.

I have labelled this piece a polemic and so it is with the excesses and one-sidedness of all polemical writing. But it is also, in my opinion, the simple truth.

Fear

We are ruled by fear at the moment, first and foremost fear of illness and fear of death but along with these there is fear of the unknown and fear of the future, all sorts of fears brought on by something we can't see or detect by any normal means and so have to rely on people who claim to know what they are talking about but who do not inspire any great confidence. Fear is, of course, fundamental to the human condition but there are times when it becomes the dominant emotion and now is one of those times for many people. When you are frightened you often act illogically through panic, and that is what lies behind much of what is happening today all over the world.

Fear is something we will never completely overcome until we reach sainthood. Still, that does point to how we might start to overcome it. Jesus said that perfect love casts out fear. What does he mean by this? I think the element in real spiritual love that demolishes fear is trust. When you love God you trust him and when you trust him you have no fear. You know he will look after you, come what may. This doesn't necessarily translate into material terms which is the mistake many people make. They think that if you put your faith in God everything will be fine. It may be but it may not because God always works on the soul and does what is best for that. The body and the earthly man are not unimportant but they are secondary.

When you fully trust God that doesn't mean you leave God to do everything for you. God gave us a mind, common sense and free will and he wants us to use these things to become a mature soul, able to function creatively in the spiritual world. I've always liked the phrase attributed to Oliver Cromwell before the battle of Edgehill "Trust in God and keep your powder dry" for it sums up just the right attitude. Always trust God but be responsible for yourself. Then you need have no fear, whatever befalls you. However, if you think God is going to bail you out whatever you do, you need to think again. He is not your nursemaid and you should never take him for granted.

Writing this piece prompted me to think about times I have known real fear in my life. Probably my two most intense experiences of fear came when I was rock-climbing as these are the two occasions I have felt closest to death. The first was when I was 13 years old and in a climbing competition at a place called Eridge which is a sandstone outcrop on the borders of Kent and Sussex. As I recall, the rock face was about 30 feet high and we climbed in teams, the team leader having no supporting ropes. I can't believe they would allow that kind of thing nowadays! Anyway, when it came to my turn to lead I got about 20 feet up and then got stuck in that I couldn't find any grips. I couldn't go up and I couldn't go down. So I just stayed very still and tried to be calm. There wasn't much else to do. Luckily an adult below saw I was in difficulties and called out to me telling me how to proceed and directing me to where a hold was. I still remember the huge wave of relief that swept over me when I got to the top and safety. That feeling was actually worth the fear. I wonder if the difficulties of life in this world will be similarly, only much more so, put into perspective after we have left it.

The second occasion was around 15 years later when I was in India. There was a place called Killiyur Falls in the forest near where I lived. To get to it entailed a walk through the forest which then was just along a rough track though I believe that a more amenable path has been created now. But the trek meant that not many people visited the Falls then. It was a rock face about 300 feet high which during the rainy season was a waterfall. At the time I am describing however it was the dry season so there was no water, just bare rock. I went with a friend, an Englishman who was staying at the local ashram which sounds more glamorous than it was. This particular ashram was nothing much and I think Richard may have been the only person there apart from one orange-robed monk.

When we reached the foot of the falls and saw there was no water we had the crazy thought that it would be fun to climb up to the top. I said it was the dry season but I remember that we actually had brought umbrellas with us so it may have been the very beginning of the monsoon. But the waterfall was created by an overflow from a lake higher up in the hills and this had not yet started to swell so the rock was still dry. We didn't really know how high it was or how difficult it might be but it didn't look too hard from where we were at the bottom. It seemed as though it wouldn't be too much to scramble up this. We could even do so carrying our umbrellas.

To begin with all went well. The ascent involved a little clambering but nothing daunting until all at once the rock face began to get steeper.

Still, this just meant we had to climb rather than clamber though we did have to do something about the umbrellas we were carrying so we hooked them on the back collars of our shirts. They weren't very large.

But then the climb got even steeper.

You might ask why we hadn't realised this from the bottom but the combination of height and tree cover had obscured the reality from us and we just hadn't thought seriously about what we were doing. The climb had started off as a boyish adventure but was now very serious. We dropped the umbrellas down below as they had become encumbrances and carried on with the climb, each of us probably wishing we hadn't got ourselves into this mess but not saying anything out loud. Descent would have been too hard as it would have been blind so there was nothing for it but to keep going even though we didn't know if it was actually going to be possible to get to the top. It was one of those times when you are living totally in the moment, your whole being just concentrating on not making a mistake.

We eventually did get to the top and, as before, the wave of relief and sense of accomplishment amply compensated for the earlier fear. I remember there was a trickle of water from a little stream which would eventually become the waterfall and we drank from this, a delicious draught that refreshed our bone-dry mouths. We sat there for a while still shaking from nerves and the climb but feeling intensely alive, the blackness of fear having given way to the bright thrill of life. I had prayed for help while climbing because that is what you do, believer (which I was) or not, when you are in such a situation, and we both thanked God for our deliverance. When we got back to town we talked about our experience with local people who told us that only the month before a schoolboy had died on the rocks attempting the same foolhardy escapade as us. We had been lucky.

Fear is the inevitable accompaniment to the conscious awareness of life in this world. It is the knowledge that life involves pain and suffering and death. I do not know how far down the evolutionary ladder fear goes but it is clearly instinctively registered by very primitive forms of life. What I do know is that it can be overcome, to an extent anyway for there will probably always be residues of it while we live in this world, by trust in God. He is the only thing that can remove fear because in him is perfect love and perfect goodness.

The False Allure of Humanism

The belief system that most people adopt today, either deliberately or more often just through absorbing the general assumptions about life, is humanism, the moral philosophy of which is encapsulated in the golden rule of do as you would be done by. This drives our current obsession with egalitarianism. It even underlies the panicked measures taken to contain Covid-19. But beneath its attractive looking exterior, humanism is an incoherent belief system and little more than a dressed-up version of nihilism.

The humanist does not believe in God* but he does believe in this abstraction of 'humanity'. Setting aside whether there is such a thing as humanity or whether there are just human beings, I would point out that humanity without a divine maker who has given it its own spiritual life and freedom is nothing more than an assemblage of atoms driven by mechanical forces. To talk of love or goodness in these terms is ludicrous. You are not real and neither am I. There is no centre to your being and you cannot in any meaningful way actually matter. You are nothing. Human beings only have any kind of integrity to their being if they have spiritual integrity. Without God we are empty vessels with no authentic individuality. 

What humanism does is borrow or steal ideas which can only have any substance in a spiritual universe and apply them to itself. This cannot work because what gives these ideas reality in the first place is being denied. It is like trying to climb while denying the fact of height. Individuality, freedom, love have no meaning in a purely material universe and to pretend otherwise is blatant self-deception.

This matters. You cannot say that as long as we accept individuality, freedom and love, it doesn't matter if we don't acknowledge where they come from. If you don't acknowledge their source you put yourself at opposition with the things themselves which become shadows of their true selves. You are living in a world of fakes and make-believe. You are an imposter, a thief. If individuality, freedom and love only exist because of God then to construct a world and a philosophy and a mode of being that denies God but tries to retain these things is to live a lie. A denier of God has no reason to care for anything because there is nothing except him and he isn't real in any meaningful sense not to mention the fact that he won't last long in any sense at all.

When it comes down to it, the humanist replaces God with self so that self eventually becomes God. This is why today a man can become a woman or thinks he can. I make my own reality. I am God. There is no absolute truth. I can be what I want to be.

When the real Christ is abandoned a false Christ arises, in the realm of ideas at first but maybe eventually in reality. This false Christ will be a humanitarian or, at least, he will appear as one. But his humanitarianism will be an end in itself not part of an over-riding approach to God. He may talk of God but his God will have to fit into the general materialistic attitude with our life in this world seen as primary. He will talk of progress, improvement, development but all these things relate to making the same thing better or apparently better. The spiritual path is not about improvement but transcendence. It does not look to make better men but new men who may be formed from the old men but are more properly described as transformed. Humanism keeps us in profound spiritual darkness because it can never liberate us from the merely human.

* Some in the modern world do believe in God or think they do but their approach to the spiritual is conditioned by the worldly, the complete reverse of which should be the case. That is why I say they think they believe in God. The general trend of their thought shows they don't really. Judge them by their fruits.